GLD vs GLDM for Gold positions - Which is better?

VTS Community,

With respect to our safety positions within the Tactical Volatility Strategy, I recently had the question whether there would be any performance improvement using the GLDM instead of GLD.  GLDM is the mini ETF so the raw price of it is lower, but it also has a smaller management expense ratio so perhaps there's a slight difference?

GLD  -  SPDR Gold Shares  (expense ratio:  0.40%)

GLDM  -  SPDR Gold MiniShares Trust  (expense ratio:  0.14%)

GLD is much larger at 100 billion AUM vs the GLDM which has about 14 billion, but they are both huge so liquidity is not an issue.  They are also materially identical and they both track very well so the only thing we're really trying to determine is whether the lower expense ratio of GLDM will make any difference long-term. 

Turns out, no.  Here's the Safety Gold positions within our Tactical Volatility Strategy since the launch of GLDM:

Now that doesn't necessarily mean that GLDM wouldn't be better anyway.  There's two factors that we would have to consider:

a)  Trade fees:

In the last few years, trade fees on ETFs have basically gone to zero aside from some tiny administrative fees so this is going to be a wash either way.  In my TOS / Schwab and Interactive Brokers accounts it shows just pennies in fees when I make a GLD trade.  So I would say right now in 2025 we can assume trade fees are basically zero.

b)  Efficiency:

If a person was trading on a smaller account size, it would be more efficient to be using GLDM given it's about 1/5th the price.  If they only had a few thousand dollars, you'll get much closer to utilizing the full amount of capital the lower the ETF price is.

GLDM is slightly better

Given that fees are a wash and efficiency favours the smaller GLDM, I don't think there's any harm in officially making the change the next time we get into a GLD position.  It doesn't have any effect at all on performance, but it will help those on smaller accounts so we should do that.