Taking Physical Ownership of A Commodity From A Roth-IRA

Question

Some physical commodity ETFs allow the purchaser to take physical possession of the commodity itself in return for the shares. So if a person owned the equivalent to 10 ounces of platinum and that was 100 shares, he could transfer the ownership of the platinum from the ETF to him in physical form.

What if this person does this in a Roth-IRA? Is the physical platinum protected by the fact that it was originally purchased in a Roth, or is this considered a withdrawal from the Roth? The reason that I ask is this does affect taxes, as it either is considered a (1) withdrawal or (2) changing the source of who owns it, and still part of a tax protected purchase.

Answer 1

Your IRA custodian must be able to support this, and there are not a lot that do. You cannot hold the metal yourself, or deposit metal you alredy hold. Here's a brief but fairly comprehensive discussion on this that I found. It talks about gold, but the same goes for platinum.