Why does gold have value?
Gold's value starts with the fact that its supply is steady and by nature it's durable. In other words, the amount of gold traded each year (The Supply and Demand) is small relative to the existing total stock. This acting as a bit of a throttle on its value, as does the high cost of mining. Mines will have yields that control whether it's profitable to run them. A mine may have a $600/oz production cost, in which case it's clear they should run full speed now with gold at $1200, but if it were below $650 or so, it may not be worth it. It also has a history that goes back millennia, it's valued because it always was. John Maynard Keynes referred to gold as an archaic relic and I tend to agree. You are right, the topic is controversial. For short periods, gold will provide a decent hedge, but no better than other financial instruments. We are now in an odd time, where the stock market is generally flat to where it was 10 years ago, and both cash or most commodities were a better choice.  Look at sufficiently long periods of time, and gold fails. In my history, I graduated college in 1984, and in the summer of 82 played in the commodities market. Gold peaked at $850 or so. Now it's $1200. 50% over 30 years is hardly a storehouse of value now, is it? Yet, I recall Aug 25, 1987 when the Dow peaked at 2750. No, I didn't call the top. But I did talk to a friend advising that I ignore the short term, at 25 with little invested, I only concerned myself with long term plans. The Dow crashed from there, but even today just over 18,000 the return has averaged 7.07% plus dividends. A lengthy tangent, but important to understand. A gold fan will be able to produce his own observation, citing that some percent of one's holding in gold, adjusted to maintain a balanced allocation would create more positive returns than I claim. For a large enough portfolio that's otherwise well diversified, this may be true, just not something I choose to invest in. Last - if you wish to buy gold, avoid the hard metal. GLD trades as 1/10 oz of gold and has a tiny commission as it trades like a stock. The buy/sell on a 1oz gold piece will cost you 4-6%. That's no way to invest. Update - 29 years after that lunch in 1987, the Dow was at 18448, a return of 6.78% CAGR plus dividends. Another 6 years since this question was asked and Gold hasn't moved, $1175, and 6 years' worth of fees, 2.4% if you buy the GLD ETF. From the '82 high of $850 to now (34 years), the return has a CAGR of .96%/yr or .56% after fees. To be fair, I picked a relative high, that $850. But I did the same choosing the pre-crash 2750 high on the Dow. "Because people are willing to trade for it.  People are willing to trade for Gold because: The value of gold goes up because the demand for it goes up, while the supply has been basically static (or growing at a low static rate) for a long time.  The demand is going up because people see it as a safe place to put their money.   Another reason Gold's value in dollars goes up, is because the value of the item it's traded against (dollars, euros, yen, etc) goes down, while its own value stays roughly the same. You point out Gold is not as liquid as cash, but gold (both traded on an exchange, and held physically) is easily sold.  There is always someone willing to trade you cash for gold.  Compare this to some of the bank stocks during the first part of our current recession.  People were not willing to give much of anything for your shares.  As the (annoying, misleading) advertisements say, ""Gold has never been worth zero""." A lot of people probably don't agree with him, but Warren Buffett has some great quotes on why he doesn't invest in gold: I will say this about gold. If you took all the gold in the world, it   would roughly make a cube 67 feet on a side…Now for that same cube of   gold, it would be worth at today’s market prices about $7 trillion   dollars – that’s probably about a third of the value of all the stocks   in the United States…For $7 trillion dollars…you could have all the   farmland in the United States, you could have about seven Exxon   Mobils, and you could have a trillion dollars of walking-around   money…And if you offered me the choice of looking at some 67 foot cube   of gold and looking at it all day, and you know me touching it and   fondling it occasionally…Call me crazy, but I’ll take the farmland and   the Exxon Mobils. And his classic quote: [Gold] gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we   melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand   around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would   be scratching their head. I think the primary reason it is so pricey now is that it is an inflation hedge, and considering how shaky the economies and out of control the spending is in many countries right now, people are running to it as a safe harbor. The increased demand raises the price as it does with any asset.  This brings us to the titular question. Why does gold have value? The same reason anything has value. There is someone out there who wants it enough to trade something else of value to get it.  It is in the news so much because it is so high right now, which unfortunately is going to cause a lot of people to foolishly invest in it at likely the worst possible time. "Gold has value because for the most of the history of mankind's use of money, Gold and Silver have repeatedly been chosen by free markets as the best form of money. Gold is durable, portable, homogeneous, fungible, divisible, rare, and recognizable.   Until 1971, most of the world's currencies were backed by Gold.  In 1971, the US government defaulted on its obligation to redeem US Dollars (by which most other currencies were backed) in Gold, as agreed to by the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944.  We didn't choose to go off the Gold Standard, we had no choice - Foreign Central Banks were demanding redeption in Gold, and the US didn't have enough - we inflated too much.   I think that the current swell of interest in Gold is due to the recent massive increase in the Federal Reserve's balance sheet, plus the fast growing National debt, plus a looming Social Security / Medicare crisis.  People are looking for protection of their savings, and they wish to ""opt-out"" of the government bail-outs, government deficits, government run health-care, and government money printing.  They are looking for a currency that doesn't have a counter-party. ""Gold is money and nothing else"" - JP Morgan ""In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard."" - Alan Greenspan" "Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it. --Publilius Syrus. Gold has value because people want to buy it.  Electronics manufacturers like the fact that it's conductive.  Jewellers like that its shiny.  Glenn Beck likes that he's selling it and his audience will buy it. Proponents of gold claim that it has ""real"" value, as opposed to fiat currency (which has no commodity backing).  Opponents of gold claim that all wealth is illusory, and that gold has no more inherent value than the paper we use now.  I'm inclined to agree with the latter (money is only money because we agree that it is, and the underlying material is meaningless), however the issue is hotly debated." To start with gold has value because it is scarce, durable, attractive and can be made into jewellery. But that does not explain its current value. In the current economic climate, it is difficult for many investors to get a positive return on conventional investments such as equities or bonds. I theorise that, in such conditions, investors decide to park their money in gold simply because there are few other good options. This in itself drives the price of gold up, making it a better investment and causing a speculative boom. As you will see here, here, and here the gold price is negatively correlated with stock market indices. I use to play marbles at school. Marbles were like gold the more you had the richer you were. They were a scarce commodity only a few in circulation. Once I secured a wealth of marbles I realized they were of little real value. They were only of illusory value. As long as we all were deceived into believe they had value they I was rich. Sure marble could be used to make marble floors ;) they were lovely to look at, and every one wanted them. Then one day, I discovered the emperor had no clothes. Wow, the day that everyone sees the true value of gold, what a stock market crash that will be. I tried to avoid gold as much as possible, but this is hard to do in todays stock market. My solace is that we will all be in the same golden (Titanic) boat, only I hope to limit my exposure as much as possible. Anyone want a gold watch for a slice of bread? "It has semantic value (because we culturally believe gold is valuable).  There is a very important point here.  Gold and many other coin metals. This ""semantic value"" is enshrined in law through the special tax status of coin metals.  You can buy a kilo of gold and not pay sales tax.  You can't buy a kilo of iron or tin and do the same.  This is the important part because investors shouldn't care about semantics. I read that the taxable status varies by state or nation, so you need to be very careful.  It's possible to evade taxes without realizing it.  It also doesn't necessarily exempt you from the form of gold.  An ingot should be tax exempt.  A collector's coin may or may not be, depending on your local laws and the difference between the value of the weight of the gold, and the value of the form of the coin." "Why does the value of gold go up when gold itself doesn't produce anything? Why do people invest in gold? Your perception, that the value of gold goes up in the long run, is based on the price of gold measured in your favorite paper currency, for example the US Dollar. An increasing price of gold means that in the visible gold market, market participants are willing to exchange more paper currency units for the same amount of gold. There are many possible reasons for this: While HFT became extremely important for the short term price movements, I will continue with long term effects, excluding HFT. So when - as a simple thought experiment - the amount of available paper currency units (US $ or whatever) doubles, and the amount of goods and services in an economy stay the same, you can expect that the price of everything in this economy will double, including gold. You might perceive that the value of gold doubled. It did not. It stayed the same. The number of printed dollars doubled. The value of gold is still the same, its price doubled. Does the amount of paper currency units grow over time? Yes: https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/BASE/ In this answer my term ""paper currency units"" includes dollars that exist only as digits in bank accounts and ""printing currency"" includes creating those digits in bank accounts out of thin air. So the first answer: gold holds its value while the value of paper currency units shrinks over time. So gold enables you to pass wealth to the next generation (while hiding it from your government). That gold does not produce anything is not entirely true. For those of us mortals who have only a few ounces, it is true. But those who have tons can lease it out and earn interest.  (in practice it is leased out multiple times, so multiple that gain. You might call this fraud, and rightfully so. But we are talking about tons of gold. Nobody who controls tons of physical gold goes to jail yet).  Let's talk about Fear. You see, the perceived value of gold increases as more paper currency is printed.  And markets price in expected future developments. So the value of gold rises, if a sufficient number of wealthy people fear the the government(s) will print too much paper currency.  Second Answer: So the price of gold not only reflects the amount of paper currency, it is also a measurement of distrust in government(s). Now you might say something is wrong with my argument. The chart mentioned above shows that we have now (mid 2015) 5 times as much printed currency units than we had 2008.  So the price of gold should be 5 times as high as 2008, assuming the amount of distrust in governments stayed the same. There must be more effects (or I might be completely wrong. You decide). But here is one more effect: As the price of gold is a measurement of distrust in governments (and especially the US government since the US Dollar is perceived as the reserve currency), the US government and associated organizations are extremely interested in low gold prices to prove trust. So people familiar with the topic believe that the price of gold (and silver) is massively manipulated to the downside using high frequency trading and shorts in the futures markets by US government and wall street banks to disprove distrust. And wall street banks gain huge amounts of paper currency units by manipulating the price, mostly to the downside. Others say that countries like china and russia are also interested in low gold prices because they want to buy as much physical gold as possible. Knowing of the value that is not reflected by the price at the moment. Is there one more source of distrust in governments? Yes. Since 1971, all paper currencies are debt.  They receive their value by the trust that those with debt are willing and able to pay back their debt. If this trust is lost, the downward manipulation (if you think that such a thing exists) of the gold and silver prices in the futures markets might fail some day. If this is the case (some say when this is the case). you might see movements in gold and silver prices that bring them back to equilibrium with the amount of printed paper currencies. In times of the roman empire you got a good toga and a pair of handmade shoes for an ounce of gold. In our days, you get a nice suite and a good pair of shoes for an ounce of gold. In the mean time, the value of each paper currency in the history of each country went to zero and the US $ lost 98% of its initial value. As long as there is not enough distrust, more paper currency is made in equity markets and bond markets on average. (Be aware that you earn that currency only after you were able to sell at this price, not while you hold it) Gerd" "Most of the answers here reflect a misunderstanding of what gold actually is from a financial perspective.  I'll answer your question by asking two questions, and I do challenge you to stop and think about what we mean when we say ""cash"" or ""unit of exchange"" because without understanding those, you will completely miss this answer. In 1971, the DXY was 110.  For people who don't know, the DXY is the US Dollar Index - it weighs the strength of the US Dollar relative to other currencies.  Hey look, it's a pretty graph of the DXY's history. In 1971, gold was $35 an ounce. The DXY is 97 today. Gold is $1170 an ounce today. Now the questions: If shares of Company A in 1971 were $10 a share, but now are $100 a share and some of this is because the company has grown, but some of it is because of inflation and the DXY losing value, what would the value of the company be if it was held in grams of gold and not dollars? Benjamin Graham, who influenced Warren Buffett, is a ""supposed"" critic of gold, yet what percent of his life were we not on a gold standard?  In his day, the dollar was backed by gold - why would you buy gold if every dollar represented gold. Finally, consider how many US Dollars exist, and how few metric tonnes of gold exist (165,000).  Even Paul Volcker admitted that a new gold standard would be impossible because the value of gold, if we did it today, would put gold in the $5000-$10000 range - which is absurd: To get on a gold standard technically now, an old fashioned gold   standard, and you had to replace all the dollars out there in foreign   hands with gold, God the price, you buy gold, because the price of   gold would have to be enormous. So, you're all left hoping the Federal Reserve figures how to get us all out of this mess without causing trouble, otherwise, let me just kindly say, you WILL realize the value of gold then. As the old saying goes, ""A fool and his money are soon parted.""  I could be wrong, but I'd say that those who've been buying gold since 1971 for their ""cash holdings"" (not index funds) aren't the suckers." "Gold has very useful physical properties for some engineering applications.  Even tiny amounts of gold can substantially improve products, so it can be worthwhile to pay high prices per ounce for gold.  For example: Gold can be ""beaten"" or electroplated to produce very thin shiny coatings.  Entire roofs (of famous buildings) have been covered with ""gold leaf"", at a cost that was small compared to the supporting structure. A very thin layer of electroplated gold provides better protection against corrosion than a much thicker layer of electroplated nickel.  Even if gold costs thousands of times more per ounce than nickel, it is cheaper to use gold as an anti-corrosion layer than nickel (for use in military-grade naval electronics). A thin layer of electroplated gold greatly increases the electrical current-carrying capacity of a thin copper wire." "Gold can be thought of to have value in one of two ways; (1) as a means and (2) as an end.  Means takes the shape of currency. In this form, we value gold in the same way we value the dollar, it allows us to purchase things we want. As a medium of exchange, gold has no definitive value and is only assigned one during the process of an exchange. For example, I would be valuing one ingot of gold to be worth a dog if I traded a dog for one ingot of gold. The value of gold in this sense is subjective as each person decides for themselves what gold is worth during the transaction. Gold as an end is valued for its own sake. A good example of this is a jeweler who purchases gold directly because of the intrinsic property(s) gold possesses. This is closer to the ""true value"" of gold than using it as a means, but virtually no one in our society views gold in this manor because virtually no one can use gold in this manor. ""You know what I could use right now, a block of gold."" - said no one ever.  But even if you are one of the select few who value gold for its own sake, this is usually done because gold provides a function. For example, if people no longer want to ware jewelry, then a jeweler will likely have to find a new line of work where he would likely no longer view gold as valuable as an ends. To sum up, gold has a perceived value for most people and an ""intrinsic value"" to a select few (for the time being)."
Of course. But then, paper also has utility. So do seashells and pinecones.   There is no obvious reason why, even in a perfect world, we would go looking for a malleable, highly-conductive, corrosion-resistant metal as something to peg the value of our banknotes to.   The argument in favor of a gold standard is not whether gold is intrinsically more valuable than paper or seal skins or anything else, it's that gold is fairly inelastic in terms of supply, so it limits the ability of central bankers to mess up the value of the currency through interventionist funny business.   If you picked up a rock and started going around telling people that we should use it as money because it's highly malleable and conductive and can be used in computer parts, they would look at you like you're a crazy person. That's not why gold is/was/should be a currency.   Gold was indisputably the perfect currency for thousands of years, because it was easy to identify, easy to handle, hard to falsify, and rare. Those were important characteristics when strangers had to carry physical money to different places without any ATMs, credit-cards, or paypal accounts. They are somewhat less critical today, but still...  The one characteristic that might *still* argue in favor of a gold standard is rarity: Since the amount of gold in the world is somewhat fixed, forcing the currency supply to be restricted to the gold supply semi-prevents governments and central bankers from getting into too much mischief (or at least, that's the theory).   I will leave it to others to argue over whether a return to the gold standard would be a good idea, but the argument has nothing to with the intrinsic utility of gold. I'm sure we can all agree that gold is a fine metal with many good qualities. I would imagine (correct me if I'm wrong) that one of the benefits of gold was it was very easy to detect counterfeiting.  It had a known weight, easily identified color, and there were many easily accessible ways to verify that it was, in fact, gold.  Paper money has been a relatively recent development, monetarily, and it seems like it has matured as methods of preventing false currency have likewise matured.  EDIT: Ah, and there it is, in one of your comments further down.  Cool. Yes and i told you that bitcoin could also be perceived as valuable too, like seashells did in the past.   Personally, i think bitcoin has value because it is a giant money laundering scheme. All the big players are investing into it because they need to funnel their drug money. "Currencies such as the dollar, the Euro, and most others are no longer tied to gold in any way. They are just paper that is worth what it's worth because everyone agrees to accept it.  Previously, currencies used to be commonly tied to gold reserves, and could theoretically be ""cashed in"" for gold, although not usually as much as the currency denomination (i.e., gold on the open market tended to sell for higher prices than what the government would give you for it)." Mainly because I have it and you don't, I can make you do stuff for it because more of us perceive its value than bother about the paper you are holding.   Picture if you will a moment in time, when the paper you are holding, represented the amount of gold you had at home, as time went by you spent all your gold and the amount the paper represented, became less and less and the amount of lunch you could buy with it became less and less.  Today the day has arrived, that you have no gold left and what your paper represents is an empty coffer . .  Move along . .people who can pay for their lunch are waiting and look, the paper they hold represents gold they have. "&gt; Value is entirely subjective to individuals. Nothing has ""intrinsic value"".  Question: *Water, oxygen -- caveats to intrinsic value because they are that which is consumed by virtue of one's being alive and staying alive and are of limited supply?*  Can we expand on ""value"" and how it operates on the barest of essentials to sustain life.   To rephrase: [1] That the tripartite nature of the system of money--token (countable), vehicle (exchangeable), and repository (valuable)--depends on life existing ergo exist as conditions necessary for the creation of an economy but yet will be necessarily valued by the economy because of the projected increases in population, that is, future demand rising as function of the earthly supply means that the value of these goods can or cannot be projected and, more broadly, [2] how do economists evaluate the role of money in relation to timing, especially when it pertains to these unproduced or ""given"" yet essential goods and especially coupled with the knowledge that the population will continue to proliferate?  Really, I'm not trying to undermine or debunk or be plain ridiculous; I'm curious as to how economic theory will (or has begun to) try to solve a ""singularity"" (threshold) problem that has yet to occur but no doubt will?   Maybe it's an unfair question but even so, I'm sure someone on this thread might steer us towards a starting point. And I only ask because the economic breakdown by otherwiseyep and the discussion in the thread herein are, say, quite as substantial as they are clear." Money itself has no value. A gold bar is worth (fuzzy rushed math, could be totally wrong on this example figure) $423,768.67. So, a 1000 dollars, while worthless paper, are a token saying that you own %.2 of a gold bar in the federal reserve. If a billion dollars are printed, but no new gold is added to the treasury, then your dollar will devalue, and youll only have %.1 percent of that gold bar (again, made up math to describe a hypothetical). When dollars are introduced into the economy, but gold has not been introduced to back it up, things like the government just printing dollars or banks inventing money out of debt (see the housing bubble), then the dollar tokens devalue further. TL;DR: Inflation is the ratio of actual wealth in the Treasury to the amount of currency tokens the treasury has printed. "The general argument put forward by gold lovers isn't that you get the same gold per dollar (or dollars per ounce of gold), but that you get the same consumable product per ounce of gold. In other words the claim is that the inflation-adjusted price of gold is more-or-less constant. See zerohedge.com link for a chart of gold in 2010 GBP all the way from 1265. (""In 2010 GBP"" means its an inflation adjusted chart.) As you can see there is plenty of fluctuation in there, but it just so happens that gold is worth about the same now as it was in 1265. See caseyresearch.com link for a series of anecdotes of the buying power of gold and silver going back some 3000 years. What this means to you: If you think the stock market is volatile and want to de-risk your holdings for the next 2 years, gold is just as risky If you want to invest some wealth such that it will be worth more (in real terms) when you take it out in 40 years time than today, the stock market has historically given better returns than gold If you want to put money aside, and it to not lose value, for a few hundred years, then gold might be a sensible place to store your wealth (as per comment from @Michael Kjörling) It might be possible to use gold as a partial hedge against the stock market, as the two supposedly have very low correlation" Since 2007 the world has seen a period of striking economic and financial volatility featuring the deepest recession since the 1930s despite this gold has performed strongly with its price roughly doubling since the global financial crisis began in mid-2007. 1. Gold and real interest rates: One of the factor that influences gold prices is real interest rate which is to some extent related to inflation. Since gold lacks a yield of its own, the opportunity cost of holding gold increases with a real interest rate increase and decreases with a fall in real interest rates. 2. Gold and the US dollar: The external value of the US dollar has been a significant influence on short-term gold price movements. The IMF estimated6 in 2008 that 40-50% of the moves in the gold price   since 2002 were dollar-related, with a 1% change in the effective   external value of the dollar leading to a more than 1% change in the   gold price (Source).  3. Gold and financial stress: It is a significant and commonly observed influence on the short-term price of gold. In periods of financial stress gold demand may rise for a number of   reasons:  4. Gold and political instability: It is another factor that can boost gold prices. Investor concerns about wars, civil conflicts and international   tensions can boost demand for gold for similar reasons to those noted   above for periods of financial stress. Gold‟s potential function as a   „currency of last resort‟ in case of serious system collapse provides   a particular incentive to hold it in case the political situation is   especially severe. (Source) 5. Gold and official sector activity: The behaviour of central banks and other parts of the official sector can have an important impact on gold prices.  One reason for this is that central banks are big holders of gold,   possessing some 30,500 metric tons in 2010, which is approximately 15%   of all above-ground gold stocks. As a result, central bank policies on   gold sales and purchases can have significant effects, and these   policies have been subject to considerable shifts over the decades. (Source)   (Source of above graphs) There is no such thing as intrinsic value. Gold has value because it is rare and has a market. If any of those things decline, the value plunges. The question of whether gold is overvalued or not is complicated and depends on a lot of factors.  The key question in my mind is: Is gold more valuable in terms of US dollars because it is becoming more valuable, or because the value of US dollars, the prevailing medium of exchange, is declining? "Gold may have some ""intrinsic value"" but it cannot be accurately determined by investors by any known valuation techniques. In fact, if you were to apply the dividend discount model of John Burr Williams - a variation of which is the basis of Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) analysis and the basis of most valuation techniques - gold would have zero intrinsic value because it produces no cash flow. Legendary focus investor Warren Buffett argues that investing in gold is pure speculation because of the reason mentioned above. As others have mentioned, gold prices are affected by supply and demand, but the bigger influence on the price of gold is how the economy is. Gold is seen as a store of value because, according to some, it does not ""lose value"" unlike paper currency during inflation. In inflationary times, demand increases so gold prices do go up, which is why gold behaves similar to a commodity but has far less uses.  It is difficult to argue whether or not gold gains or loses value because we can't determine the intrinsic value of gold, and anyone who attempts to justify any given price is pulling blinders over your eyes. It is indisputable that, over history, gold represents wealth and that in the past century and the last decade, gold prices rise in inflationary conditions as people dump dollars for gold, and it has fallen when the purchasing power of currency increases. Many investors have talked about a ""gold bubble"" by arguing that gold prices are inflated because of inflation and the Fed's money policy and that once interest rates rise, the money supply will contract and gold will fall, but again, nobody can say with any reasonable accuracy what the fair value of gold at any given point is.  This article on seeking alpha: http://seekingalpha.com/article/112794-the-intrinsic-value-of-gold gives a quick overview, but it is also vague because gold can't be accurately priced.  I wouldn't say that gold has zero intrinsic value because gold is not a business so traditional models are inappropriate, but I would say that gold *certainly * doesn't have a value of $1,500 and it's propped so high only because of investor expectation.  In conclusion, I do not believe you can accurately state whether gold is undervalued or overvalued - you must make judgments based on what you think about the future of the market and of monetary policy, but there are too many variables to be accurate consistently." "Gold has no ""intrinsic"" value. None whatsoever.  This is because ""value"" is a subjective term. ""Intrinsic value"" makes just as much sense as a ""cat dog"" animal. ""Dog"" and ""cat"" are referring to two mutually exclusive animals, therefore a ""cat dog"" is a nonsensical term. Intrinsic Value:  ""The actual value of a company or an asset based on an underlying perception of its true value ...""  Intrinsic value is perceived, which means it is worth whatever you, or a group of people, think it is. Intrinsic value has nothing, I repeat, absolutely nothing, to do with anything that exists in reality.  The most obvious example of this is the purchase of a copy-right. You are assigning an intrinsic value to a copy-right by purchasing it. However, when you purchase a copy-right you are not buying ink on a page, you are purchasing an idea. Someone's imaginings that, for all intensive purposes, doesn't even exist in reality! By definition, things that do not exist do not have ""intrinsic"" properties - because things that don't exist, don't have any natural properties at all. ""Intrinsic"" according to Websters Dictionary:  ""Belonging to the essential nature or constitution of a thing ... (the intrinsic brightness of a star).""  An intrinsic property of an object is something we know that exists because it is a natural property of that object. Suns emit light, we know this because we can measure the light coming from it. It is not subjective. ""Intrinsic Value"" is the OPPOSITE of ""Intrinsic""" One possible downside is contribution limit.  The 401K contribution limit is $18,000 for 2016, which is more than three times the limit for IRA contributions ($5,500). Your last sentence is key. If you have multiple accounts, it's too easy to lose track over the years. I've seen too many people pass on and the spouse has a tough time tracking the accounts, often finding a prior spouse listed as beneficiary.  In this case, your gut is right, simpler is better.