This Is Why People Are So in Love With Gold
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Hey there, OddLots listeners. It's Tracy Allaway and Jill Wiesenthal. We are very excited to announce that OddLots is going to Washington. That's right. For the first time, we are going to do a live public OddLots recording in our nation's capital. That's going to be March 12th in Washington, D.C. at the Miracle Theater. And guests will be announced in the coming days. But in the meantime, you can find a ticket link at Bloomberg.com slash OddLots.

Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal. And I'm Tracy Allaway. Tracy, gold has had a really good year. Here's a question. One of the last times we talked about gold, you made fun of me for being a gold bug.

Are you going to start this episode out by doing the same thing? No, you're completely vindicated. Gold has done really well over the long term, over the last several years. It's been one of the best performing assets. It's stable. I take back everything I ever implied negatively about gold. You're going to be nice to the gold books now? Yeah. All right. I'm not capitulating, but it's done really well.

Look, the chart's great. I will say I'm sort of an accidental gold bug. It has not been a conscious choice to accumulate, but it has turned out really well. So gold keeps hitting record after record as we're recording this. I think it's at 2,600 an ounce. Yeah, 2,649. It had gotten as high as 2,800 almost in October, but it's been, I mean, it's the last couple of years have been phenomenal.

That's crazy. And the other really interesting thing is, like, it started going up even as the Federal Reserve was raising rates, which is something that you don't normally see. Like, normally gold has that inverse relationship to rates, that negative correlation. Yeah. And I guess the demand has just been so strong that it doesn't really matter this time around. Can I say something? Mm-hmm. So...

you bring up the sort of Fed connection, et cetera. And so I want to learn more about gold, but I don't really have much interest in just talking to like another gold macro guy because I don't know what they say. They always have the same story. It's like inflation and currency debasement and all that. Maybe that's all true, but I sort of like, I want to talk gold.

But it's just like, I sort of felt going into this conversation that we can't just talk to someone who's just, you know, going to tell the same story they could have told about gold every single day for the last 20 years. I think it's a very valid feeling to have. There is something like physical,

about gold. Obviously, it's shiny. It's fun to hold. Even like silver, you can have fun stacking those coins, as I know personally. So it makes sense to talk to someone who's in the physical market. We're going to talk about what's going on in the gold market, but actually get into why people love gold.

gold so much and why people want to be covered in gold. And why right now? Why right now? Why people want to accumulate gold, have it in their safes, have it on their person, etc. We really do have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Maksud Aghajani. He is the founder of TraxNYC.com.

New York City-based jewelry dealer. And listeners might know, we actually had him on the podcast once in early 2020. And listeners might know him if they ever saw the movie Uncut Gems, one of my favorite movies of the last few years, because he actually was in the movie. He played, I guess, kind of himself to some extent in the movie. I think the character's name was Yossi in the Diamond District, in the Gold District in Manhattan. And we're going to talk all these gold with Max Higgins.

Maksud, a.k.a. Yossi. Thank you so much for coming back on Odd Lots. Thank you for having me for a second time. What's your life been like the last four years? How did that all change your life? The Odd Lots? How did that change your life? It's only been up from there. And that little movie that you appeared in at the end of 2020. The movie did good. Odd Lots did good. Other podcasts did good. And all the social media also did really good for me.

Here's an important question. Did you bring me the diamond-encrusted Furby? I did not. That's all I want out of life. In all reality, it wasn't even diamonds in that thing. It was made out of brass. I know. It's movie magic. Honestly, I would take the brass version too. It might not be good for your skin. Oh, really? What does brass do to your skin? It turns it green. She got it. She knows it. Yeah. All women know this, the big difference between gold and brass. So other than the fact that gold doesn't turn your skin green,

What is it that people love about gold? Why do people buy gold from you? Well, gold is for people who have money to burn, right? You know, if you're, you could go back thousands of years, if you're an Egyptian pharaoh and you're not starving, you have plenty of labor and grain and...

land and property, what don't you have? Well, I guess I want to make a gold casket, a gold esophagus, so to speak. And maybe some peasant might find some in the field and I'll give him the grain he needs and he'll give me the gold. So it accumulates with people who

are not struggling. And that turns it into a status symbol. Joe, I remember you actually wrote a really good piece about the history of gold and how it was sort of intermingled with power and this idea that, you know, like,

You needed a big military basically to go out and get gold and you needed a lot of labor to dig it up. And so it became very much associated with power. It's like a proof of work, right? If you can, like even in the Bitcoin sense. Also, you know, one thing Tracy, you know, Max mentioned the pharaohs. Gold doesn't tarnish.

Right. So it's like historically going back thousands of years, it was associated with the gods is like one commodity that is truly immortal in a way that most things that we find on Earth aren't.

Okay, I have a really dumb question, though. When gold is hitting records like it is right now, do you see more or less demand for jewelry? I mean, it's kind of stable, to be honest. You know, when I started my business in 2004, gold was about $300 an ounce. Now it's $2,500, $2,600 fluctuating over there. I've watched it the whole way. Its increase in price does have a little bit of effect on demand, but not that much.

But, you know, at some point people can't afford what they want. Back in 2004, you could stack yourself with gold, 14 carat at $12 a gram or whatever it was. It was a great time to really stack gold. But now your dollar doesn't go so far and you can't really have as much as you'd like. But on the other hand, in 2004...

If you bought $100 worth of gold, you had $100 worth of gold. Right. In 2025, if you buy $100 worth of gold, you still have $100 worth of gold. So in a way, no, for real, like if you want to like convert your dollars into something else, it does the same job at $2649 as it does at $300. Yeah. Well, listen, until the guy that bought it at $2004 walks through the door and his $100 worth of gold looks like. Yeah.

A bigger pile than your $100 worth of gold. But whatever, you know, money's a game. Gold is one way to play it. It's a safe way to play it. I love it because I have a jewelry store full of gold chains and gold jewelry. And as the price goes up, what I can't sell, I melt. And I still make my money back. And that's a fantastic aspect of it. And it never let me down. And I don't think it ever let anybody in history down. So you can't really go wrong with it.

You might not be the biggest winner like you are with the cryptos or whatever it is. Somebody who bought, you know, a pizza pie for 15 or 20 Bitcoin back in 2011 and now could have been a billionaire or whatever. It might not do that, but it'll keep you safe and sound and happy. Do you feel competition with the crypto market? I mean, I don't want gold to go up, you know, that doesn't do anything for me. I know it will eventually, but...

Yeah, crypto had a major impact. Who knows if crypto would never, if Satoshi Nakamoto never bothered to do whatever he was doing or whatever that was. What would gold be right now if it wasn't trillions of dollars literally inside of crazy cryptos? Yeah, could be more. What are people into these days?

What are people into these days? When they come into your store, what are they like? How much is it like the crazy diamond and crescent Furbies that Tracy didn't get today versus just wanting a nice tasteful chain versus what? I mean, listen, everybody, everybody has their own little need. You know, they want, they want to give a gift for a girl. So they might want to be able to buy, um,

a tennis bracelet, okay? They have a girlfriend or they have a side chick or they have a baby mama. I don't know what their situation is, but you got to buy her something, all right? So you got to go and you got to buy. It could be a tennis bracelet that will be with diamonds. Will they tell you if it's for the side chick? Will they say that? By the way, this is for the side chick. I could usually tell what's going on. Is the bracelet for the side chick smaller than the one for the wife?

You know, that varies from customer to customer. I'll put it that way. Okay. Can I ask the basic question, though? Why do you think gold prices happen going up? Well, listen, I mean, you know, we got to do the math. All right. It's one thing I learned since the last time I was here to today. A lot of people, maybe they might be in a beautiful building like we are now or in a professional field, but they're not doing the mathematics here.

at all. All right. Thirty six trillion dollars and that one trillion dollars in interest. You got China buying it up like crazy. So I hear central banks, this, that. If you look in the numbers, you're going to find out what's really going on. And it's like the Wizard of Oz out there. You really don't want to look behind the curtain here because I don't know what you're going to find there and how this is all going to come to a head.

As things get turbulent, you know, when in the new administration or what have you, whatever you want to call it, and cryptos and quantum computing and robots and this and that, I don't really know how it's all going to play out. But I know that if anything happens, I have my safe, my combination to my safe, my security system and my physical assets that I can rely on. So that's what it is for me. I don't know.

I feel like there is a tension there, though, because like if I imagine myself coming into a jewelry store and I'm like, OK, I'm going to buy a gold chain because, you know, it's a safe store of value and things are uncertain right now. Like, that's OK. But on the other hand, I'm buying like something that's pretty frivolous, right? It's like it's a gold chain. What am I really going to do with it? As it should be frivolous. I mean, you're not supposed to be on the edge of starvation, you know, struggling against all odds. Oh, I need shoes and a winter coat.

And coal for my furnace, you know. Prioritize the gold. Yeah, we're supposed to be productive, successful people in a modern world with surplus. Wait, but when people come into your store, do they talk to you about why they're buying gold? Do they say stuff like, I'm worried about inflation? Yeah, some people do. I mean, there's somebody that came in. I'll never forget him. He was listening to what I was saying. And he came in. This was when gold was 1850.

And he was painting houses and he bought like 10 ounces. So he saved up the money, $18,500 or whatever it was. And he saved up the money and he said, you know what? I'm tired of losing my money. I'm tired of spending. He bought 10 ounces of gold because of what I said. And, you know, wherever he is now, if he held on to that gold, now it's, you know, $26,500 or whatever.

So he did great and he just bought 10 ounces of, you know, one ounce each of bouillon bars. But I feel like he even got shortchanged. I think the gold price after that ridiculous pandemic with all that printing should be way higher than even $26.50. But I'm not looking for that to happen anytime soon.

Bye.

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I'm Alpine skier Michaela Schifrin. I've won the most World Cup ski races in history. But what does success mean to me? Success means discipline. It's teamwork. It's the drive and passion inside of us that comes before all recognition. And it's why Stiefel is one of the fastest growing global wealth management firms in the country. If you're looking for success, surround yourself with the people who will get you there.

Thank you.

If you're an advisor or investor, choose Stiefel. Where success meets success. Stiefel Nicholas & Company, Inc. Member SIPC and NYSE. For J.D. Power 2024 award information, visit jdpower.com slash awards. Compensation provided for using, not obtaining the award.

One thing that I always liked on your Instagram page, and I'm not sure if you've done one recently, you used to do like these really fun, like sort of like, let's take a look at geopolitics and like the charts and the maps. Have you still been doing that? Yeah. I mean, that's not like the... I found that to be very entertaining. Well, you guys would. You guys are, you know, a little smart and stuff like that. But for the average person in the crowd, sometimes I have to do something a little bit more...

I remember like years, I don't know what year it was, and you had like the chart of Iran and the chart, you know, and like the different like tensions in the Middle East. I do that on Trax News. Oh, that's the Trax News page. Yeah, yeah. I have a little side channel where I talk about what's really going on in the world. But when it comes to my main pages, I have to make money. Yeah, I get that. Okay, so I have to go and I have to stick around the materials, the diamonds, the sapphires, everything.

the gold and I have to market my jewelry to the masses in a clever way, make my money, buy more gold chains. I'm placing an order for half a million for seven kilos of gold chains. I'm going to flood out my shop and I'm going to hunker down and I'm going to wait for it all to end. What are your security costs right now? Well, listen, I mean, I'm in the middle of the diamond district. My rent is about $50,000 a month.

But I have three spaces up in 14A, which is on the 13th floor. And then I have a mezzanine and then I have a storefront. And luckily there's police cars there in two precincts nearby. I'm next to Fox News and Rockefeller Center. So I'm in a safe place. If there's ever was a place to stash gold, this is the place to do it. So I'm going to take advantage of that fact.

When you leave for the day, how big is that protocol of locking up everything? Right. Well, my staff does it. I have cameras. I see what's going on. It's like a casino or a bank. If you make a proper protocol, you don't have to sit here and worry about it so much. When you talk about buying half a million, seven kilos worth of gold, making a...

half a million dollar order. What's that like? Who are the big players in the sort of wholesale gold distribution? And for anybody doing the math, that's in 14 karat gold. So they're going to get seven kilos. They're going to be thinking this guy's not on the up and up. That's coming from different chain manufacturers in Italy, sometimes could be Indonesia or somewhere else. And they have factories and they source their gold, however, which way they do it.

You know, I've been to some of these factories. They're beautiful factories, family run. But I like to buy my gold in gold chains. Now, if I buy gold bars or grain and I do that often as well, I do that right on the street on 47th Street with several different vendors there that are really, really cool people.

worth the visiting and learning about. What do higher gold prices actually do for your profit margins? Because I imagine like the actual manufacturing cost is probably the biggest chunk. Yeah, no, that's not the manufacturing cost is not the biggest chunk. I mean, the gold, the material is the biggest by far and it eats away and then you have to raise your prices. But jewelry is the only industry in which you raise your prices and sales could go up because people associate that with a higher quality.

Right. You know, they'll they'll look if people don't know anything about it, they'll say, hey, this sapphire is 30,000. This one's 20,000. So that sapphire must be better than this one. You know, and that's how people think about jewelry. And that's the psychology behind it.

And, you know, that works in our favor if we're building a jewelry brand or whatever. So, by the way, we're recording this on January 7th. Just today, Mark Zuckerberg, the Meta CEO, the Facebook guy, released a video about content moderation. And a number of people noticed he was wearing a $900,000 watch.

His style has changed. Yep. What do you, is there been, have you noticed a shift in general sort of public styles of people these days, maybe versus say 10 years ago of wanting to wear their wealth on their wrist or on their neck more? Yeah. Yeah. The people are growing up. Things are definitely changing and people are flashing more.

a little bit more i mean you know there was an era of steve jobs where he was the real leader and he was uh you know um the same pair of jeans and sneakers new balance sneakers uh very plain and you know once he passed um other people are stepping out and the watch game is i guess something that caught mark's eye and he's in it now and he's playing along which is a great for business

And, you know, that's really what's been going on. And I think that's a great trend. A lot of people wearing different timepieces. There's way more information about them now. The market has kind of been democratized a little bit where people could look up different watches and find their certain styling. And this guy is stepping out. He's stepping up and he's changing his personality. Maybe he did ayahuasca. I don't really know what got into him. But it's good for business. So I'm happy about it. He definitely had a little makeover recently. You can tell. Yeah.

We've been talking a lot about gold, but we should talk about diamonds as well because gold's been going up. Diamond prices have been going down for a while. And I imagine some of it is the pressure from lab-grown diamonds. But what's going on there? Well, the lab-grown is in the market and it's weighing it down heavily because you can't tell the difference.

and even I buy them sometimes. And, you know, the real challenge is you used to be able to sell, you know, SI2, I1, J color. What are these words? These are all the gratings of the stones. Okay, all right, keep going. So didn't you buy an engagement ring ever? You forgot a ring. You should know. It was a family heirloom, so I never had to go to the... Lucky you. Yeah, I got very lucky. I had no money in those days. So the lower, you know, lower grade stones...

They used to play a part, but now, why would I buy a lower grade stone? Here's a decent example. Why would I buy a Honda Accord

built from a factory when i could buy a lab grown mercedes yeah i get that okay you know so it's really it kills the low end yeah it's because if you're gonna go the low end anyway you don't really care but once you take out the low end the high end is coming with it and all sorts of things are going down but um on natural is still natural natural gems are a different story so the natural gems are for the wife

Yeah, they're for their wives and they're for a way for you to spend money. Wait, my engagement ring is actually an aquamarine. It's not a diamond. But this reminds me, like, do you see other types of stones coming into fashion? Like the more natural gemstones, if maybe like the lab grown diamonds are kind of muddying that market? Not yet. Nobody really knows what to do. Okay. So engagement, marriage, these are, you know, the highest societal matters that one can...

And society doesn't know how to decide that there has to be some leadership. Someone has to get engaged with a sapphire to start a trend. Some major celebrity or...

You know, God forbid Melania gets a divorce and gets a new husband. He buys her a ruby. I think we'll see it. Well, Kate Middleton had a sapphire ring. Oh, she did? Yeah. That was a big deal. Yeah, that's a big deal. And that's the way they do it over there. Because that was kind of Princess Diana had, I think, a sapphire. So I think that was the trend. But it never really caught on into the masses just yet. It's still diamonds. Wait, why do things like fall in and out of fashion like that?

Like, why do diamonds have such a hold on the engagement market still? That's a fantastic question. I mean, this was, you know, propagandized by De Beers at some point of time, somebody's brainchild to be able to show commitment and it also the shoe fit.

So they wore it. She got a one-carat, she's got a one-and-a-half, or my husband bought me a three-carat, but yours is J-color. And it's just a game for people to play and for a way to have the guy spend money.

One more diamond question. But like, how come diamonds, my impression is notoriously, if you get a giant diamond engagement ring, like, yes, okay, that's great. But if you break up or you divorce and you want to go sell it, it immediately loses a ton of value. Why is it that diamonds never really like transformed into a store of value in the same way that gold did? It's a luxury product. Okay, listen, another example that I give most of my clients is,

Right. You could buy you could go to the liquor store. You have a $60. You could buy a bottle of champagne or you could buy a bottle of Jamaican rum. OK, so one is going to get you way more drunk for way longer than the other. You know, champagne, half the bottle is going to fly out when you open it. Half the contents of the bottle. But Jamaican rum, you could sit under a bridge for a month and, you know, whatever. So the fact of the matter is, is one is a luxury product for celebration.

and one is not. Okay? If you really want, you know, if you're somewhere in the Middle East or in Asia, and you're getting married, you're going to cover your wife in gold so she could feel secure about her, you know, marriage or divorce or commitment or whatever. But here in the West...

you know, at the top 1% of society or civilization or whatever it might be. It's a different trend and you're buying something that is frivolous and luxurious. If you really want something that's going to keep your value, give your wife a gold bar or, you know, you're not going to see in some, you know, on Park Avenue at some major wedding hall or whatever, a wife covered in gold coins. Right.

Okay. All right. You know, like you would... Maybe one day. Maybe one day. Yeah. After, you know, after the economy really takes a nosedive, then yeah, maybe. So that's the reason. Let's talk about watches a little more. You sell watches. I'm looking at a 92,000 fully iced out Sky-Dweller Oyster Perpetual Rolex watch on your website. What's a cool watch brand these days? I mean, Rolexes are always... Yeah. What are people into now? What's the hot thing in watches? Well, the big boys...

Obviously, Patek Philippe, Audemars and Rolex. And then if you really want to stand out, you might get a Breguet or, you know, Cartier's or Cartier as they like to pronounce it is something that's also cute. But aside from that, listen, you're getting a watch not to tell the time. Let's just keep it real.

Okay, you're getting a watch to have a status symbol. So they call Rolexes the new money. When you get your first real money, you get yourself a Rolex because you know it's going to do the job. You've arrived. Yes. And then from there, you go out further and further into something that might be a little bit unknown, but amongst the community of people in the watches, it's respected.

And there's definitely several different brands like that. And none of them come to mind at the moment. But, you know, I usually rely on my friend Roman Sharf.

When it comes to watches, he's an expert in that field. I used to know a big luxury watch collector in Abu Dhabi. Maybe that's unsurprising. And I never really understood the thesis of speculating on watches, but he was big into that. He would buy and then he would trade and sell. Is that an investment thesis that you buy into or not so much? You know, at my store, I feel happiest when I have...

a million in watches and a million in gold or something like that. Okay, so you can't ever go wrong with those assets. And they do, Rolex just raised their list prices. So the prices went up on all the watches and anybody who has a Rolex gained and anybody who didn't is gonna have to be, you know, get their dollars up even higher to get one. So you can't go wrong with some of those assets. And you go look, you know, you'll see some, run into a YouTube video or something like that

Somebody who bought a Rolex straight out of the army in 1958 or 1963 and they bought it and they kept the box and papers and they bought it for $650. And today it's worth a quarter of a million or 150,000. Must be nice. Yeah. I mean, you know.

A lot of the things, if you go and buy them today and you're a young person, if you're a young person listening to this, a few might be, and you go and you buy a Rolex and you don't take the stickers off and you buy a limited edition and you keep it there and then you're 65 years old. I know it seems like a long, long time from now, but that day is going to come. And if you pull that Rolex out of that closet or out of that safe, you're going to really be happy with what's going on.

And that's the nature of watches because these companies and these brands do something special for, you know, their timepieces and it works. I want to ask you a sort of real meat and potatoes business question, but going back to safety and security and operations and like, you probably have to like,

hiring can't be people for your store. It can't be like totally trivial because you have to be able to trust them, et cetera. That must be a huge part of it. I'm curious what you've seen. I was talking to my barber recently and he was saying he had a hard time hiring these days. And I said, well, what's the hard part? Is it that like, is it hard to find people who can cut hair? And he said, no, I'm actually just, that's basically what he said. He said, the hard part is basically like just finding people who are sort of normal and put together.

And I'm curious, like from your perspective, like what you've seen on that front. Yeah. You know, New York City is a rundown in a lot of different ways. So there's a lot of people that I mean, you got to sort through a lot of people to find a good quality human being. Yeah. OK. A lot of them are usually going to be immigrants that are coming here from all over the world that are really looking to work and have a real work ethic that they're expected to work.

People that grow up in this society want to get high.

Work is something that for them to just an obstacle for them to overcome, for them to enjoy themselves and binge on Netflix. Have you seen the desire to get high? And I mean here in the literal sense of drug use. Has that changed a lot in the 20 years that you've had tracks and having to deal with it? Well, listen, you know, I smoke periodically and so on and so forth. But I actually I have to make sure that I fulfill my obligations to my business.

All right. Alcohol is a drug that people partake in after work or so on and so forth. But people have become abusive. And, you know, it's not just the drugs. It's the theft and the overall lack of work ethic in today's society. They just don't understand it. And, you know,

People are doing the bare minimum or they're pretending to work or so on and so forth. And the moment you check on their work, that's a serious problem. Luckily, the AI and the robots are coming so they can finally go to Central Park and play Frisbee or whatever they really want to do.

But it's quite tragic and those people need to be scrutinized and filtered out. And, you know, they really don't have any dignity or self-respect in my opinion. Wait, am I going to be buying jewelry from a robot in the near future? Are they going to be behind the counter? Well, the beautiful thing is, you know what I'm saying? If jewelry is the last or one of the last few businesses that...

you know, escapes the eye of Sauron, which would be like a Jeff Bezos, right? All right. Amazon, it started out with books. Now it's paper towels. Now you could host a server. Now anything you can imagine, movies, TV shows. He gobbled up everything. But jewelry...

I still have this little, you know, territory that I could expand in. And that's by the grace of God, if nothing else. So luckily, jewelry is kind of one of those few things that's not going to have a barcode on it. ♪

Bye.

However you do it, TastyTrade's got the advanced tools you need to tackle stocks, options, futures, and more, all in one place. Chart your heart out with over 300 indicators. See opportunity differently with interactive curve analysis. Use backtesting to learn from the past and plan for the future. The platform is only the beginning of better trading. You'll also find low pricing, lots of education, and backup from a support team that really gets how traders trade.

Success. It's discipline.

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Just going back to hiring, how do you actually find and source your employees? Do you put out an ad or is it like through word of mouth, through networking? I put out an ad. I asked to whatever, you know, if anybody has somebody or I put up a post on social media. But the best way to hire, I find, is to tell somebody, hey, you're here for a one week trial. And if you do well, I'll extend that to a one month trial. And if you do well on that, too much. I'm not hiring anybody.

it's like getting married to somebody at this point. I'm not marrying them until I trust them and really get to know them and see them under different circumstances. So it's not like the corporate world. It's a diamond district. And I really scrutinize them. And I also ask the other opinions. How did this person do? Did this person say good? And once you have a good panel of people...

then you can really rely on different opinions and build a good group. It's the biggest challenge, especially in the jewelry business. That's why people work with their family. Yeah. Is it front of shop that you have the hardest time? I mean, is it the people sort of like working the counter, talking about the jewelry, showing it to them? Or is it people in the back? Is it people? Everybody. Everybody who touches expensive materials is...

Scary to me. You know, somebody's picking up a casting. Someone's shopping for sapphires. Are they taking a bribe? Are they picking off some stones? Are they taking a couple of grams? Are they doing some other nonsense, nefarious business? Which I've seen it all. I've had employees just take stuff off the shelf and go to the scrapper and scrap it. Wow. You know, I've walked into my shop and I see someone is wearing a chain underneath their neck. A big one.

And underneath their shirt, but I could see it through the shirt. I'm like, listen, what is that chain? And, you know, he fast talks to me. He's like, no, I'm waiting for the client. He's going to come right back. I'm just going to give it to him. And I'm like, I'm like, there's no keeping it warm in the meantime. Yeah. I'm like, there's no way this person is just looking me dead in the eyes and lying to me. I'm like, OK, turns out he was just stealing it, ready to go home with it. I mean, listen, I've been through everything you can imagine. I've had people forge my signature on a check.

pick up double castings. You have to pick something up for a client, you pick up two, you give one to the client, one for yourself. I've had it all and I've lost my faith in humanity because of it. So it's a tough one. - Humanity will fade away, but that 14 karat gold chain will be there for thousands of years. - Wonderful. - This gets back to the, gold is permanent. - We're right back where we started.

Wait, so one of the most annoying things I find about shopping for jewelry, and I mean, I don't shop for jewelry that often, but when I do, it's like the pricing transparency. Sure. You look in the case and half the time you can't read what's written on the label because they're often handwritten or they've stuck the label like under the ring and so you can't see it. That's the fun part. Yeah. I get that it's good for you. Sure, sure. You do? What do those prices actually...

A, how do those prices come about? Like, what do they actually mean? I assume they're all negotiable. They usually are. And then B...

how often are you actually changing the labels? Like if the price of gold goes up. 20%. Yeah, 20%. Do you have to like go and rewrite all the little price tags? Yeah, you might have to. That depends on what type of store or what type of operation you're running. Or sometimes you just do the math in your head. Or sometimes you say, hey, listen, price of gold went up. And next week I might change this tag, buy it now. You know, so it is what it is. I mean, the price is based on the raw materials.

plus labor, you know, plus design, plus the fee that I want to make. And like I said, it doesn't have a barcode on it.

It's not like buying a digital camera right now where it's $4.95 on Amazon and $4.88 at Walmart, you know, and you just say, okay, I don't want to save this or I don't want to do that or whatever it might be. This is a, it still has a little bit of more of a romance to it to make the purchase and learn the raw materials.

And, you know, if I was to tell somebody out there, if you're shopping for something, you're the client. And what do you what should you do is the real question. OK, let's what should Tracy do? All right. Tracy should go walk into any jewelry store in the diamond district. Look at whatever she likes. Say how many carats, how many grams, what's the price? And then walk out the door and buy nothing. OK, go to the next door and the next door and the next door and then come back and say, I saw this over here. But can you do this for me over here?

1850, I come right back. If they give you a look or they do this, don't shop there. That's it. Don't let them pressure you to buy and don't let them pressure you with a story and whatever it is. Because that's kind of the Venus fly trap that people use. They come in, they befriend you and they use all these crazy social tactics to get you to get something to buy. And if you really want to

I'll be sharp. You know, when I go to the diamond district and I have to buy sapphires right now, I have to buy a lot of sapphires for, to make manufacturer chains. One person's telling me this quality for $150 a carat. The other one's telling me this quality for one 20 and other qualities, $60 a carat for something. Somebody might've had something in their safe for 45 and they're willing to let it go for 25. And you can manipulate that system. If you shop around and, and,

turn the tables on them. So that's what your responsibility is. Actually, this raises a question that I've sort of wondered about. People talk about this. What's the advantage for you of being in the district? Because it sounds great for the customer. You walk down five different stores, especially if you're getting something fairly generic like a ring or whatever. But, you know, this is this phenomenon that happens in the economy of companies sort of agglomerating in one place. What is the reason for

Why does it advantage you to be in the Diamond District versus somewhere else where there isn't a neighbor? I'll tell you right now. Well, you know, maybe after work today, I'm going to go. I'm going to stop by a Korean casting manufacturer that...

He's got some new models in of stretchy bands that have springs in them that are, you know, diamonds all around. And that's not something I could have created or invented. They're not reaching the end consumer. They're not setting their own diamonds. They're just selling casting. So they have that. Someone else might have a sapphire or emerald that I need. And there is someone else might be an incredible diamond setter. There's a casting company that is able to do big castings if I want to cast a really big piece.

okay someone's an expert in silver i can't hire all these people i can't put them all under one roof and if you want to be you know if yeah if i want to if i manufacture all my jewelry and i know exactly what i'm selling and i put it in a store like i'll go to madison avenue or whatever i'll go downtown but if i really want to be able to wheel and deal and be competitive i want to work with all of my friends that i've been doing business with for 20 years

in the Diamond District and use all of the resources and all the creative energy that's there when it comes to the gems, the gold, the castings, the labor, the sizing, the engravings, the laser etchings, whatever it might be. It's a fun place to do business. Do you expect higher tariffs to impact you at all? Not really. I don't really know. I mean, I hear so many stories about these tariffs. One person's this, one person's that.

Listen, you know, in my experience, getting people to pay to play isn't the worst thing in the world. So, you know, it might be more difficult on one end and then someone's got more money on the other end. And then this happens and then that happens. And there's a chain reaction to a variety of different effects.

Try it at this point. I'm tired of looking at America declining ever since I got here in 1993. Try something. If I opened a store, I'm actually going back to the diamond. Sometimes Tracy and I joke around about opening up, going into the businesses of the people we speak to. Can someone new just arrive in the diamond district or would they be looked at askance? How deep are the roots of everyone who's there? Pretty deep. I mean, money talks.

You could establish relationships with money pretty quickly. I established mine with no money, but... Yeah, how'd you get your foothold there? Well, I started photographing jewelry and putting it up on eBay in 2004 when people laughed at jewelry on the internet. So this is when Amazon was pretty cheap to buy and I think was selling books or something at that time. So I was able to start photographing jewelry and putting it up on the internet. So I would photograph it, put it up, sell it, then buy it,

And ship it. And I was able to feed different vendors money until they would take me serious. And I learned the industry. But...

Unless you have years and years of experience, you don't really want to sit here and go to the diamond district and open up and do anything. This is not the type of thing that you just want. It's like me saying tomorrow, well, I want to open up a dentistry something. You know what I'm saying? I don't know anything about that industry. I don't know anything about carpets. I don't know anything about manufacturing of computers. It's not my field. I dedicated myself to a field.

So if anybody wants to dive into that field, your grandkid might do it, might do well.

but you might have a hard time with it. I don't know. There's one other thing I wanted to ask you, which is who is actually buying and whether you've noticed any changes there. Because we hear stories, I mean, obviously you hear stories about like China's central bank buying lots of gold or Russia maybe. But like, do you notice it in terms of actual, like do Chinese people come in and buy more gold lately? No, not here particularly, but they might be buying it from someone else.

I'd really love to ask my gold vendor, Kahan is his name, or Isaac is his name. Kahan is the company. And his father and his uncle put that together, put a business together. They went separate ways and he just inherited. His father just retired when he was 80.

He has a safe full of gold and silver, and he has lots and lots of customers. Who they are, I'm not sure. They're a variety of different people. But personally, people reach out to me once in a while. A family member might want to run into some cash, or they just sold their business, and they want to spend a half a million bucks on gold or something like that. Or...

A variety of different people. I haven't seen a pattern. Okay, I haven't seen a pattern and I really haven't seen a rush of it either. Right now, the game is crypto. So it's, you know, that's what they're thinking about and that's what it is. I'm not a big fan of it at all.

Because I've held gold my whole life. I've passed it. I've gave it. I've hit it. I've sold it. I bought it. I melted it. I've never held a Bitcoin. I've never seen one. I've heard of them. And I know they're out there somewhere. But I don't want to wake up in the morning and need my Wi-Fi password to get my money.

How secure is your safe password? Is that just in your head? I guess you could always bust it open if you forget it, right? Yeah. I mean, the security is about the cameras that are pointing at it. And yeah, there's a combination plus a key. But listen, I don't take my trays in and out every day. I am...

I don't do any of that to be honest. I have managers and managers that manage groups of people that I trust. Some people are trustworthy, believe it or not, in this world. Few. And the example I give is like this, right? There's a lot of iron in the world and a lot of base metals and there's very little but there is gold. Same thing with people. There's a lot of untrustworthy people.

There's a lot of base metals. There's a lot of base people. And then there's a few amazing people that are special, just like the gold and metal is special. And the universe creates them just like the universe creates gold. You look at the periodic chart. You got to figure out where that came from. That's up to you to decide. Wait, actually, one last question. In Uncut Gems and Adam Sandler gave the stone to Kevin Garnett to hold for a while for good luck, would a jeweler ever do that?

Um, yeah, anything can happen. I mean, you know, you might be doing a promotion and you might be putting diamonds on someone. And this stressed me out so much. The thought of like, I'm just going to hit me out to, uh, living it for 20 years as well. So yeah, you definitely give your gold and your jewelry and your watches to different people and you hope you find them at the end of the night.

where they're going to award shows. Oh, yeah, yeah. Sometimes you tell them, hey, you know, one of the lines I use to prevent myself to be in that situation, my insurance company won't allow it. Oh, that's smart. So, you know, this is the jewelry business. If you put yourself...

a word game that people are not prepared for. You're prepared for it, but they're not. Oh, my insurance company, they'll void me if I give out my stuff. Have insurance premiums been going up? They must be, right? Yes, they have. If you don't make any claims, they kind of leave you alone. So,

So, you know, the insurance is like almost a break-even game. Right? You know, my insurance is expensive. And if you use it, it goes up. And if you don't use it, you're giving them the money and so on and so forth. But better to have it and not use it. Yeah. Does it go up in tandem with like the price of gold though? Yeah.

No. Huh. Maksud Aghajani, TraxNYC. Thank you so much for coming on Oddline. Hey, thank you. You guys were, thank you for giving me this golden opportunity. Glad to have given you your start all those years ago. We had to have at least one pun in the conversation. No, that was fantastic. Thank you so much. That was a lot of fun. I'm glad. Thank you.

That was fun, Tracy. It's always fun talking gold jewelry with Max. And yeah, I mean, I guess the investment thesis has borne out so far. Gold's done great. But I know it was kind of a joke, but I really do take this seriously that at any time, no matter what the price of gold is...

A hundred dollars worth of gold is always a hundred dollars. And so if you know, for real, because if you're thinking like I have X amount of dollar value that I want to store in some other non fiat form, this is true, right? Well, I'll tell you what was interesting was the idea of like competition with the crypto. Yeah, that was really interesting. Because it did. I mean, as he was saying, it does sound like people are kind of, you know, it's sort of an either or. Yeah.

Two, especially for like the people who want to like speculate on price, right? Two other things that I thought were really interesting from that conversation. One is his description of what specifically lab-grown diamonds did to the diamond industry about sort of chopping out the low end of the diamond market. Because it makes sense. Why buy a cheap diamond or a low-grade diamond when you could get a high-grown lab diamond?

like once you've already established that you're going to get something cheap, why not get the lab grown version? And then the way that that filters through to the price overall. And I was just really interested in like his comments on hiring and how difficult that is. Like I said, I had heard that my barber said the same thing, like just this core aspect of like,

hiring people who are sort of like with it, not seeking to get high per se. Interesting, interesting comments there. I'm sorry. Speaking of being a bad worker, I'm very distracted by I looked up the diamond encrusted Furby.

Oh, yeah. So how much is that going for? Well, so it got auctioned off by A24, the production company. Oh, yeah, yeah. And I'm trying to find how much it went for, but I can't find it at the moment. But I'm just staring at all these animated videos of the diamond furby. I might watch that movie again. Do you want to? I found it so stressful the first time. I don't think I could. It was really stressful. But, you know, I know how it ends now. So maybe that'll make it a little bit.

Maybe that'll make it a little easier. There's some people are making imitation gold Furbies. I got one of those. Yeah, just get one of those. OK. The bronze one. Shall we leave it there before I just start like narrating my online shopping? Yes. Let's leave it there. OK.

This has been another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Traci Allaway. You can follow me at Traci Allaway. And I'm Jill Wiesenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow Maxud Aghajani. Check out his Instagram. It's TraxNYC. Follow our producers, Kermen Rodriguez at Kermen Armin, Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, and Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks. Thank you to our producer, Moses Andam. For more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash Odd Lots. We have transcripts, a blog, and a newsletter. And you can...

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