RE:All this angst about shortage of bars, Obviously this is your first rodeo huh? Why don't you look what happened to homestake mining the last time the world entered a depression.
Thse two links will give you an idea of how homestake performed in the 30's - during the depression. There are no guarantees in life or the investment market and history doesn't always repeat itself so do your diligence and then some more. I only offered the example of homestake mining to show how gold and perhaps pretium might behave in a depressionary scenario - whch may wellbe imminent. https://www.caseyresearch.com/daily-dispatch/gold-stocks-depression/ And the chart doesn’t show that you could have bought both stocks at half their 1929 price five years earlier, which would have led to gains of around 1,000%. And get this: both companies paid healthy and rising dividends as the depression wore on; Homestake’s dividend went from $7 to $15 per share, and Dome’s from $1 to $1.80.
Yes, volatility was high in the gold stocks throughout the depression, with occasional wild price swings, but after the 1929 crash most of the volatility was to the upside.
The bottom line is that the two largest gold producers – during a time of soup lines and falling standards of living – handed investors five and six times their money in four years.
From Homestake’s chart, you get a clear picture of what the stock did compared to the market as a whole:
https://seekingalpha.com/article/234105-the-lessons-of-homestake-mining-in-gold-bull-and-bear-markets