Bullion is gold or silver in the form of bars or ingots, rather than coins or jewelry. When governments and banks store their gold reserves, they keep it as bullion: heavy rectangular bars stamped with their weight and purity. These bars are valuable purely for the metal they contain, not because they're beautiful or useful for anything else.

The famous gold repository at Fort Knox holds thousands of gold bars, each weighing about 27 pounds and worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Banks and investors buy bullion as a way to store wealth, since gold and silver have been considered valuable for thousands of years across almost every civilization.

You might see bullion in a movie about a bank heist, where thieves try to steal those gleaming gold bars. In real life, bullion is serious business: it's traded internationally, and its price changes daily based on what people are willing to pay for precious metals. When someone says they “invest in bullion,” they mean they buy actual bars or ingots of gold or silver, not stocks or paper certificates representing it.