Midas Touch?

Imaru Casanova in Van Eck's Manhattan headquarters. Her office is far less dangerous than the sketchy aircraft she boarded to visit remote mines in Ghana, Mexico and Russia.

In 1991 Imaru Casanova, age 16, won a foreign-studies scholarship, left Venezuela and arrived in Denver knowing scarcely a word of English. Her language instruction course happened to be at the Colorado School of Mines. So perhaps it was providential that after a roundabout career that began in mechanical engineering, she found herself last year visiting a gold mine near Jacobina, Brazil.

Casanova, 50, runs the $700 million Van Eck International Investors Gold Fund. Among its holdings is Pan American Silver; among Pan American's assets is that gold mine in the Brazilian forest. The mine ostensibly contains between 100 and 280 tons of gold, worth between $8.6 billion and $22 billion at present prices once the metal is, with considerable difficulty, extracted from the dirt in which it is dispersed.

Over the past decade the Van Eck fund has delivered 6.3% annually, net of its 1.4% expense ratio. That return puts it ahead of the 5.1% average Morningstar calculates for the precious metals category, but short of what you could have had from a stock index fund. Why own gold?

The desirability of gold, half of which is used for jewelry or electronic parts, rests on its value as a hedge against inflationary mischief from issuers of currency. Sometimes this works. Eggs are getting expensive. Gold was up 27% in 2024.

As an object to hoard, gold competes with Bitcoin. Bitcoin has a known limit on supply. Gold does not, but it seems that after several millennia of searching, humans have found most of the easily accessible sources. “It is increasingly difficult to find large deposits,” Casanova says, “and increasingly difficult to get permits for the mines.”