The purpose of this post is to promote my gold price web scraper page that I created a few months ago (in May 2013) which locates at this page.

Gold Price in Malaysia Web Scraper

The objective of the page is to provide a convenient tool to compare the real time gold price and the spread (difference between buying and selling price) among 4 Malaysian banks, namely Public Bank, Cimb, UOB and Maybank, that offer gold investment/saving account.

The prices are grabbed from the respective banks’ website and are updated every hour. If you need to get an up-to-date gold price data to monitor, don’t forget to bookmark this page. The page is responsive, which means it will display nicely when accessed via mobile too.

A little bit of background

I opened my gold investment account with Maybank since last year June 2012 when the gold price was around RM 164 per gram. It continued to climb till RM 170 per gram before it come tumbling down till now.

I have a colleague who once believed that the gold price will always up and was very confident that it will never go down kept adding on to his account when the gold price was still rising till RM 170 per gram. He kept doing it even when the price started to reverse direction in October 2012.

He dropped his jaw and never found it again when he discovered the following chart:

Gold Price Since 1265 Till 2010

Most people, like my colleague (and me too), have the believe that gold is a good investment that can fight against inflation. However, based on the chart above, it is not the case. The gold price reached its peak in around year 1465 and started decreasing each year for several centuries (!) till recently where it began to rebound in year 1965. If you were alive 500 years ago (where the gold price hit its peak) and happened to buy the gold and hold it till now, you are still losing money (even until now)!

Conclusion: gold is not an investment since it does not generate value by itself. It is for speculation. As Warren Buffett once pointed out, which one do you prefer: a billion dollar worth of gold or a billion dollar worth of land which can be used to generate food, and various kind of products. The former does not grow, however, the latter will if managed properly.