Double feature: Jim Cohen and Axel Merk from AICA's 2024 Roundtable

The NAVigator this week offers a taste of the action from the Active Investment Company Alliance's 2024 Fall Roundtable, which was held on November 13 in New York City. Individual investor Jim Cohen discusses how consumers in closed-end funds are caught between activist "whales" and fund sponsors, wanting to hold funds to account to narrow discounts and improve management, but sometimes coming away with lesser results. Axel Merk, President and Chief Investment Officer at Merk Investments — manager of ASA Gold and Precious Metals Limited — discusses why gold has worked better as a geopolitical hedge but has been less successful as an inflation hedge. He adds that precious metals perform better in higher-rate environments, and he doesn't think the current round of rate cuts will go so far as to pose a problem for gold in the medium term.