DGZ is not a company and does not produce a product. It is an exchange traded note issued by Deutsche Bank AG that pays out at maturity the monthly inverse performance of a gold futures index, plus the return on short term treasury bills, net of a 0.75 percent fee. The instrument exists to let an investor take a short position on gold without borrowing or selling futures outright, and it has sat in the money the way a short position sits whenever its underlying rallies.
The structural math is the whole story. Because the note resets its principal amount on the first business day of every month, it captures the inverse of each month's gold move and then compounds it forward, so a run of up months compounds losses the way a run of down months compounds gains. It trades in the low single digits after starting at $25 in 2008, has fallen sharply this year alongside a gold market that ran to record highs, and carries only a few hundred shares of daily volume. The case for DGZ reduces to three questions that separate a gold bear from a gold bull: how high and how persistent is the current gold price, how much drag the monthly fee and reset impose over a holding period, and whether Deutsche Bank remains creditworthy through the 2038 maturity.