Tracking Precious Metals and Real Estate Returns

What a gold position actually costs

Metal seems simple to track: you bought ounces at one price, the spot price today is another. Three things complicate it.

<strong id="e3QwFw4SrE9">Premiums over spot.</strong> Physical metal always costs more than the spot price. A gold coin typically carries a 5 to 8% premium, and when you sell you usually receive less than spot. Your real cost basis is what you actually paid, not the spot price on the day you bought. Ignoring the premium overstates your return by roughly the size of the premium.

<strong id="eY9WUj6pTnJ">Storage and insurance.</strong> A 7% gain on gold becomes about a 5.5% gain after 1.5% a year in storage fees. The fee is small enough to ignore per month and large enough to matter over a decade, which is how it gets missed.

<strong id="e-XGLNTT_CJ">Currency.</strong> Gold is priced in US dollars globally. If the pound moves against the dollar, a flat gold price in dollars is not flat in pounds, and the reverse. Your return on metal is the metal price plus or minus the currency movement, and a tracker that does not convert is reporting the wrong number.

Metals are not one asset

Gold, silver and platinum have different dynamics, and lumping them into a single "metals" line hides the difference. Silver is noticeably more volatile than gold, which means a metals allocation that looks balanced can be silently dominated by whichever metal moved most. Platinum carries industrial demand cycles that gold does not. If you hold more than one, track them as separate positions with separate cost bases, because the premium, storage and currency effects apply to each purchase independently and the tax rules treat disposals separately too.

How a rental property return is built

Property is the hardest class to track accurately, because the return is the net result of everything moving in and out. A rental has at least five streams: the rent received, the mortgage payment, maintenance and repairs, insurance and ground costs, and the change in market value. Vacancy months drop the income side without any single event announcing them.

Here is a worked example, in pounds, with round numbers for the arithmetic. A flat bought for £300,000 with a £60,000 deposit rents at £2,000 a month, so £24,000 a year. Annual expenses of £18,000 cover the mortgage, insurance, maintenance and agent fees, leaving £6,000 of net cash flow. The property appreciates 4% in the year, £12,000. Total return is £18,000 on the £60,000 of equity you actually put in, which is 30% on equity.

That 30% looks impressive and is real, but it only holds if every income payment and every expense is logged. Miss a £2,000 repair or forget a vacant month, and the 30% drifts toward fiction. The same £18,000 measured against the £300,000 property value is 6%, which is the other common error: property returns belong on the equity you invested, not the property value.

When we rebuild a property's history from a seller's spreadsheet, the usual finding is that the quoted yield counted the rent and forgot the voids and the boiler. The headline number is rarely the number the property actually made.

Why the comparison has to be rebuilt

The point of holding metals and property alongside stocks is to compare them, and you can only compare numbers built the same way. A rental yield, a stock gain and a gold price move mean nothing side by side unless each one is calculated from the same events: what went in, what came out, what income arrived. That is capital flow tracking, and it is the reason the method matters more than the spreadsheet.

Tracking on that basis answers the questions that matter: whether the gold position earned its keep in the last downturn compared with the savings account, whether the rental is outperforming the stock portfolio on the money actually invested, and where the next contribution belongs. The <a data-href="https://eptawealth.com/learn/how-to-calculate-true-investment-returns-aQpCq6u1j47Q" href="https://eptawealth.com/learn/how-to-calculate-true-investment-returns-aQpCq6u1j47Q" id="eD1Zxda2XsAU">true returns explainer</a> shows the same rental figures built with and without the flows.

What to record, month to month

For metals, record each purchase at the price actually paid including the premium, note the storage or vault charge when it lands, and let the platform convert the spot price into pounds. For property, record the deposit at purchase, then every rent payment, every expense, and any capital spent on improvements separately, because improvements add to cost while repairs are an expense. Property values are a judgement, not a feed, so an occasional manual update is the honest approach rather than pretending there is a live price.

When you do sell, the tax treatment differs by class and by wrapper. Metal and property gains are subject to capital gains tax above the annual exempt amount, with different rules for residential property, so the <a data-href="https://eptawealth.com/learn/uk-capital-gains-tax-on-investments-rates-rules-and-strategies-axNHi1k6v8dN" href="https://eptawealth.com/learn/uk-capital-gains-tax-on-investments-rates-rules-and-strategies-axNHi1k6v8dN" id="e4Kjz-uWX5X0">UK capital gains tax on investments guide</a> covers the rates and the reporting. This page explains how to track the assets; it is not advice, and your circumstances decide what you hold and what you sell.