Bloomberg: “Investment experts see opportunities ranging from dividend-paying stocks to crypto lending platform Aave.” Not one of them mentioned gold or silver.
It’s simple . The financial industry is no different from the pharmaceutical industry. They will always advise you to consume what is profitable for them self. They earn nothing if you buy gold. It’s really that simple in my opinion.
I wonder if the miners will take a hit when people have to cover their losses, like they did the last time the market had a correction. Oh wait, they would have to own miners first, right?
The trick is to invest in the miners after due diligence and on a weekly or so basis adjust the Stop Loss points. If and when they 'take a hit', you preserve your profits. (I'm probably singing to a choir member)
Dear Alasdair I completely agree and I am myself trying to convince clients to at least go for a 20/20/60 strategy but its mostly difficult because they read the financialnoress and almost nowhere find gild to be fancy yet. I am fighting a fight and have almost given up not even if I show them SP performance against gold they often would believe me. Its a kind of brainwash i fear.
On another matter I do have a question which is going around in my mind. Genesis forces stablecoins to be backed by „crappy“ treasuries however there is no question that this may suck up USD liquidity or slow it down when small oeople in emerging markets would start using them and store some funds un them. Of course they would have to teke some KYC hurdles but imagine thise woukd be softened or lifted it really could become a kind of springtime for the USD at least for a while. Fo not understand me wrong I am no favoring this but am making my thiughts where the Ace for the US may be hidden as it always was in my career that the US had the prifit in the end and the others only experience. Concretely by how much stable coins would have to grow in order to make a didference for the debt situation in the US and how much would havt to be passed to new „customers“ hands?
Hope my question is understandeable i am not native in English.
It's important to do your own homework and not assume that your financial adviser is working for you. In fact, the vast majority are following the investment portfolio designed by the institution that plays it safe and only looks at long term results. So they only think in 10 year, buy and hold mode. It serves them, not you. I made changes this year that has shifted my YTD performance from about 3% to 15% so far. Yes, I bought miners and dumped the losers.
The thing here is to assume ( & rightly so ) that most all Investment Manager's are working for themselves first with you a distant second ....Same with Estate Agents & numerous other scumbags and charlatans
Bloomberg and the rest of the alleged financial advisors are adhering to the unwritten demands of the Fed and/or US Treasury being: "Don't embarrass us by revealing our levels of money printing and consequential US$ debasement." Help maintain the pretence or face the consequences over your license!
As a financial professional within the industry for 35 years—and one who has long bucked the establishment—I’ve been recommending both gold (Au) and silver (Ag) since the days when gold traded around AUD $1,500 over 15 years ago. That perspective colours how I see the current situation, and why I believe the industry remains backward on this subject.
1. Historical Bias Against Gold
Advisors, especially those trained within modern portfolio theory, are conditioned to see gold as “non-productive” because it doesn’t yield dividends or cash flow. That bias runs deep. It means they often ignore gold even when its function as a hedge is screamingly obvious.
One telling example comes from a 20-year veteran adviser at Schroders, who summed up the institutional attitude like this:
*“Physical gold provides no utility and therefore should not be considered an investment, it is often referred to as greater fool theory, i.e. you need to find a greater fool to pay you a higher price than you purchased it for. It is speculation. An investment provides income, to own gold you actually have to pay someone to own it, i.e. it needs to be stored somewhere. The only time someone may want to consider owning gold is if they fear the stability of the reserve currency (the USD), we have got close over the last decade. There are better diversifying investments.
The miners are also typically not good investments. As gold is a scarce resource, they typically reinvest all they earn to find the next deposit. Sometimes they are cheap, but even when they are cheap they have still been dogs of investments.
I could go on, but there are two assets—debt and equity.”*
Another example of industry tone comes from a more “measured” adviser commentary, which nonetheless pushes gold to the margins by treating it as an afterthought:
*“Have you seen the price of gold?”
“What about gold?”
“Is there a reason you don’t invest in gold?”
These are common but also intermittent questions. An investment that has recently increased in value will receive attention. Its proponents will talk about it. The media will cover it. People want to know more about it. This waxes and wanes. Middling performance isn’t so exciting. It doesn’t attract attention. People don’t want to know. Gold is up right now. People want to know.
Unlike various other investments that emerge, we don’t dispute gold’s legitimate status as an asset or a commodity. Does it have a place in your portfolio?
We have rules when building portfolios. Understanding the risk/return characteristics of assets. Shares. Listed property. Fixed interest. Cash. There are clear evidence-based reasons to hold those four asset classes in a portfolio. A properly managed portfolio requires rules around construction and management…
Proponents of gold use various arguments to justify its position as a must-have investment. A hedge against inflation. A safe haven in times of calamity. An alternative to assets with low returns. Where does gold fit? Is it a growth asset or a defensive asset? A long-run chart can provide some perspective.”*
This tone sounds rational, but it reveals the deeper flaw: if something doesn’t fit into the equity/debt/cash/property box, the industry simply excludes it rather than reassessing its framework. Gold, which is neither a “growth” nor a “defensive” asset in their terms, gets pushed aside instead of recognised for what it is: money and the ultimate insurance policy when all other models break down.
My Own Experience: Compliance and the Gag Order
And then there’s the anecdotal proof of this mindset. In 2012, I had my own compliance manager sit in my office as I explained that clients were asking me what I was doing personally — and that I was adding gold and silver to my own portfolio. I placed a 1oz gold bar and a 1kg silver bar on the desk. He picked up the gold once, weighed it in his hand, and said dismissively: “This will be nothing more than a paperweight in a few years — worth nothing.”
I responded directly: “I wish you to allow my recommendations to my clients as this is a direct conflict of interest and unethical if you refuse.”
His reply was telling: “Yes, I will allow you to do it — but only if you submit a detailed advice document that I must personally sign off on.” He then imposed what amounted to a gag order: I was to stop sharing all correspondence with fellow advisers and never advertise the fact. In other words, I could quietly recommend gold to my clients, but only under heavy restrictions, as though it were something shameful to be hidden from the broader advisory world.
That one moment captures the prevailing culture inside the industry: not only a blind spot, but an active suppression of gold’s role in wealth preservation.
2. Performance Blind Spots
As noted, the S&P and gold tracked closely until late February. When equities stumbled on Trump’s tariff announcement, gold decisively broke higher, briefly testing $3,450. This was a clear signal of shifting risk dynamics. Yet most mainstream advisors refused to recommend even a token allocation to gold, leaving investors exposed to a 20% equity drawdown.
3. Institutional Herding
Bloomberg and similar outlets reinforce equity-centric thinking. Their models, indexes, and benchmarks are geared around stock performance, not wealth preservation. That creates inertia—nobody wants to be the outlier championing gold while the industry narrative clings to equities.
4. The Culture of “Gold Bashing”
For decades, establishment voices have gone out of their way to belittle gold investors, often with sound bites designed to discourage ordinary people from even considering it.
Example 1 – Dave Ramsey, Total Money Makeover (2014):
“The statement of intrinsic value means that people seem to think that somehow gold is mythical in that it is automatically always accepted as an exchange method. People say something like ‘the gold standard.’ That refers to several things, but I’m just saying in the sense that if things go bad, gold will always work to be exchanged for things. That is not true, so that’s not intrinsic value.”
Example 2 – Media Safe Haven Mockery (2012–2013):
In 2012, after 12 straight years of gains, headlines hyped gold as destined for “stratospheric” levels:
• “Safe haven gold is tipped to run up to $3000.” — Australian Financial Review, Sept 27, 2012
• “Gold has the strongest upside potential of all the precious metals in 2013.” — Platts Metals Daily, Dec 31, 2012
Yet only months later, when gold corrected 13% in two days (April 2013), the same media rushed to dismiss it as a “highly volatile and speculative asset which generates no cash flows.”
They doubled down with sweeping comparisons:
*“So if you had invested $10,000 in the Australian share market in 1980, this would have grown to just under $100,000 today. The global share market, as measured by the MSCI World ex-Australia index, leaves you with a sum of $54,000.
Now, look at gold. Your net return after more than three decades of investing and after adjusting for inflation is zero, nil, zip. In fact, you are slightly out of pocket.
So by investing in gold, you have incurred extraordinary volatility, sudden and unexplainable price drops and had no protection against inflation for no return whatsoever. Some safe haven.”*
This kind of narrative sets up a strawman argument: it cherry-picks start and end dates to paint gold as a failure, while ignoring the periods where gold dramatically outperformed equities (the 1970s, 2000–2011, and today).
This pattern—hype, correction, ridicule—has repeated for decades. And yet, across every cycle, gold has retained its role as a form of money and ultimate insurance.
5. Gold Is Not a Financial Product — It Is Money and the Ultimate Insurance
This is where most of the industry gets it wrong. Gold is not simply another “asset class” like equities, bonds, or even bitcoin. It is the one asset that sits outside the financial system:
• No counterparty risk — unlike bonds, equities, or even bank deposits, gold doesn’t rely on a debtor, a board, or a central bank to make good on a promise.
• Monetary function — for thousands of years, gold has been the ultimate settlement medium between nations, institutions, and individuals. Currencies have come and gone, but gold has remained the reference point of value.
• Liquidity without dependency — when trust in credit or fiat weakens, gold performs because it is money in its own right, not a derivative of someone else’s balance sheet.
• The ultimate insurance policy — when assets start failing, gold doesn’t just hedge portfolios, it preserves wealth. It’s the ballast that keeps value afloat when credit, equities, or currencies sink.
6. The Three Assets That Stand Supreme Over Time
And when we ask the bigger question—what assets truly stand supreme over time? The list is short, and history proves it. Only three have consistently held value across centuries and civilisations:
1. Property – Land and real estate remain the backbone of generational wealth across empires, dynasties, and nations.
2. Gold – The universal store of value, recognised across every culture and era as money.
3. Fine art – A marker of cultural capital and scarcity, withstanding wars, inflation, and regime changes.
Everything else, from stocks to currencies, has had its cycles of boom and bust, but these three remain the enduring pillars of wealth preservation.
Conclusion
The message is clear: gold has outperformed, equities are struggling for momentum, and the dollar-credit backdrop is deteriorating. Advisors who continue to ignore gold—and the miners—are exposing clients to asymmetric downside. At some point the industry will be forced to adjust allocations, but by then the protection may already be gone.
There is no commission, at least no repeat commission selling gold. Also, the logistics, storage and insurance of physical deter - it's not super simple.
I complete agree with ' Herman ' ( below ) - Turkeys don't vote for Xmas , so it's not that surprising that theses alleged Investment Manager's will not be pointing their clients toward physical Gold & Silver anytime soon ....if ever . This said any number of them could easily have been cute enough to have seen the writing on the wall previously and been stacking for themselves
Treat Miners as trades and physical as your repository / base holdings. Only buy a miner, or indeed any other derivative, when it's ratioed performance against Gold, based on your trading timescale, is positive. Seems to be working for me so far this year.
One silly argument I heard from an investment adviser was that gold could go down considerably if the German Bundesbank has to sell their gold if the Euro defaults.
Could you explain as the dollar collapses, what will happen to stocks, ADRs and ETFs of gold and silver, of gold and silver miners, and of Chinese equities denominated in HKD and CHN. Many thanks for your wonderful work.
I.M.H.O. - Anything and everything denominated in the Dollar ( any Fiat Currency ) will have a supremely hard time of it . If HKD & CHN are both backed by metal prior to the up-coming collapse then it's a somewhat different story .
It’s simple . The financial industry is no different from the pharmaceutical industry. They will always advise you to consume what is profitable for them self. They earn nothing if you buy gold. It’s really that simple in my opinion.
Exactly So
Well they still would appreciate their percentage. However, they benefit from your work instead of actively trading on your behalf.
I wonder if the miners will take a hit when people have to cover their losses, like they did the last time the market had a correction. Oh wait, they would have to own miners first, right?
No, they short it to bits....and THEN they buy it back...
There are examples,where the short was...130 % of the company....go figure,,
The trick is to invest in the miners after due diligence and on a weekly or so basis adjust the Stop Loss points. If and when they 'take a hit', you preserve your profits. (I'm probably singing to a choir member)
Dear Alasdair I completely agree and I am myself trying to convince clients to at least go for a 20/20/60 strategy but its mostly difficult because they read the financialnoress and almost nowhere find gild to be fancy yet. I am fighting a fight and have almost given up not even if I show them SP performance against gold they often would believe me. Its a kind of brainwash i fear.
On another matter I do have a question which is going around in my mind. Genesis forces stablecoins to be backed by „crappy“ treasuries however there is no question that this may suck up USD liquidity or slow it down when small oeople in emerging markets would start using them and store some funds un them. Of course they would have to teke some KYC hurdles but imagine thise woukd be softened or lifted it really could become a kind of springtime for the USD at least for a while. Fo not understand me wrong I am no favoring this but am making my thiughts where the Ace for the US may be hidden as it always was in my career that the US had the prifit in the end and the others only experience. Concretely by how much stable coins would have to grow in order to make a didference for the debt situation in the US and how much would havt to be passed to new „customers“ hands?
Hope my question is understandeable i am not native in English.
Thank you Alasdair for all you are doing.
It's important to do your own homework and not assume that your financial adviser is working for you. In fact, the vast majority are following the investment portfolio designed by the institution that plays it safe and only looks at long term results. So they only think in 10 year, buy and hold mode. It serves them, not you. I made changes this year that has shifted my YTD performance from about 3% to 15% so far. Yes, I bought miners and dumped the losers.
The thing here is to assume ( & rightly so ) that most all Investment Manager's are working for themselves first with you a distant second ....Same with Estate Agents & numerous other scumbags and charlatans
🎯
Thank you Alasdair.
Bloomberg and the rest of the alleged financial advisors are adhering to the unwritten demands of the Fed and/or US Treasury being: "Don't embarrass us by revealing our levels of money printing and consequential US$ debasement." Help maintain the pretence or face the consequences over your license!
Some people are beyond help.
HI Alasdair Hi everybody,
As a financial professional within the industry for 35 years—and one who has long bucked the establishment—I’ve been recommending both gold (Au) and silver (Ag) since the days when gold traded around AUD $1,500 over 15 years ago. That perspective colours how I see the current situation, and why I believe the industry remains backward on this subject.
1. Historical Bias Against Gold
Advisors, especially those trained within modern portfolio theory, are conditioned to see gold as “non-productive” because it doesn’t yield dividends or cash flow. That bias runs deep. It means they often ignore gold even when its function as a hedge is screamingly obvious.
One telling example comes from a 20-year veteran adviser at Schroders, who summed up the institutional attitude like this:
*“Physical gold provides no utility and therefore should not be considered an investment, it is often referred to as greater fool theory, i.e. you need to find a greater fool to pay you a higher price than you purchased it for. It is speculation. An investment provides income, to own gold you actually have to pay someone to own it, i.e. it needs to be stored somewhere. The only time someone may want to consider owning gold is if they fear the stability of the reserve currency (the USD), we have got close over the last decade. There are better diversifying investments.
The miners are also typically not good investments. As gold is a scarce resource, they typically reinvest all they earn to find the next deposit. Sometimes they are cheap, but even when they are cheap they have still been dogs of investments.
I could go on, but there are two assets—debt and equity.”*
Another example of industry tone comes from a more “measured” adviser commentary, which nonetheless pushes gold to the margins by treating it as an afterthought:
*“Have you seen the price of gold?”
“What about gold?”
“Is there a reason you don’t invest in gold?”
These are common but also intermittent questions. An investment that has recently increased in value will receive attention. Its proponents will talk about it. The media will cover it. People want to know more about it. This waxes and wanes. Middling performance isn’t so exciting. It doesn’t attract attention. People don’t want to know. Gold is up right now. People want to know.
Unlike various other investments that emerge, we don’t dispute gold’s legitimate status as an asset or a commodity. Does it have a place in your portfolio?
We have rules when building portfolios. Understanding the risk/return characteristics of assets. Shares. Listed property. Fixed interest. Cash. There are clear evidence-based reasons to hold those four asset classes in a portfolio. A properly managed portfolio requires rules around construction and management…
Proponents of gold use various arguments to justify its position as a must-have investment. A hedge against inflation. A safe haven in times of calamity. An alternative to assets with low returns. Where does gold fit? Is it a growth asset or a defensive asset? A long-run chart can provide some perspective.”*
This tone sounds rational, but it reveals the deeper flaw: if something doesn’t fit into the equity/debt/cash/property box, the industry simply excludes it rather than reassessing its framework. Gold, which is neither a “growth” nor a “defensive” asset in their terms, gets pushed aside instead of recognised for what it is: money and the ultimate insurance policy when all other models break down.
My Own Experience: Compliance and the Gag Order
And then there’s the anecdotal proof of this mindset. In 2012, I had my own compliance manager sit in my office as I explained that clients were asking me what I was doing personally — and that I was adding gold and silver to my own portfolio. I placed a 1oz gold bar and a 1kg silver bar on the desk. He picked up the gold once, weighed it in his hand, and said dismissively: “This will be nothing more than a paperweight in a few years — worth nothing.”
I responded directly: “I wish you to allow my recommendations to my clients as this is a direct conflict of interest and unethical if you refuse.”
His reply was telling: “Yes, I will allow you to do it — but only if you submit a detailed advice document that I must personally sign off on.” He then imposed what amounted to a gag order: I was to stop sharing all correspondence with fellow advisers and never advertise the fact. In other words, I could quietly recommend gold to my clients, but only under heavy restrictions, as though it were something shameful to be hidden from the broader advisory world.
That one moment captures the prevailing culture inside the industry: not only a blind spot, but an active suppression of gold’s role in wealth preservation.
2. Performance Blind Spots
As noted, the S&P and gold tracked closely until late February. When equities stumbled on Trump’s tariff announcement, gold decisively broke higher, briefly testing $3,450. This was a clear signal of shifting risk dynamics. Yet most mainstream advisors refused to recommend even a token allocation to gold, leaving investors exposed to a 20% equity drawdown.
3. Institutional Herding
Bloomberg and similar outlets reinforce equity-centric thinking. Their models, indexes, and benchmarks are geared around stock performance, not wealth preservation. That creates inertia—nobody wants to be the outlier championing gold while the industry narrative clings to equities.
4. The Culture of “Gold Bashing”
For decades, establishment voices have gone out of their way to belittle gold investors, often with sound bites designed to discourage ordinary people from even considering it.
Example 1 – Dave Ramsey, Total Money Makeover (2014):
“The statement of intrinsic value means that people seem to think that somehow gold is mythical in that it is automatically always accepted as an exchange method. People say something like ‘the gold standard.’ That refers to several things, but I’m just saying in the sense that if things go bad, gold will always work to be exchanged for things. That is not true, so that’s not intrinsic value.”
Example 2 – Media Safe Haven Mockery (2012–2013):
In 2012, after 12 straight years of gains, headlines hyped gold as destined for “stratospheric” levels:
• “Safe haven gold is tipped to run up to $3000.” — Australian Financial Review, Sept 27, 2012
• “Gold has the strongest upside potential of all the precious metals in 2013.” — Platts Metals Daily, Dec 31, 2012
Yet only months later, when gold corrected 13% in two days (April 2013), the same media rushed to dismiss it as a “highly volatile and speculative asset which generates no cash flows.”
They doubled down with sweeping comparisons:
*“So if you had invested $10,000 in the Australian share market in 1980, this would have grown to just under $100,000 today. The global share market, as measured by the MSCI World ex-Australia index, leaves you with a sum of $54,000.
Now, look at gold. Your net return after more than three decades of investing and after adjusting for inflation is zero, nil, zip. In fact, you are slightly out of pocket.
So by investing in gold, you have incurred extraordinary volatility, sudden and unexplainable price drops and had no protection against inflation for no return whatsoever. Some safe haven.”*
This kind of narrative sets up a strawman argument: it cherry-picks start and end dates to paint gold as a failure, while ignoring the periods where gold dramatically outperformed equities (the 1970s, 2000–2011, and today).
This pattern—hype, correction, ridicule—has repeated for decades. And yet, across every cycle, gold has retained its role as a form of money and ultimate insurance.
5. Gold Is Not a Financial Product — It Is Money and the Ultimate Insurance
This is where most of the industry gets it wrong. Gold is not simply another “asset class” like equities, bonds, or even bitcoin. It is the one asset that sits outside the financial system:
• No counterparty risk — unlike bonds, equities, or even bank deposits, gold doesn’t rely on a debtor, a board, or a central bank to make good on a promise.
• Monetary function — for thousands of years, gold has been the ultimate settlement medium between nations, institutions, and individuals. Currencies have come and gone, but gold has remained the reference point of value.
• Liquidity without dependency — when trust in credit or fiat weakens, gold performs because it is money in its own right, not a derivative of someone else’s balance sheet.
• The ultimate insurance policy — when assets start failing, gold doesn’t just hedge portfolios, it preserves wealth. It’s the ballast that keeps value afloat when credit, equities, or currencies sink.
6. The Three Assets That Stand Supreme Over Time
And when we ask the bigger question—what assets truly stand supreme over time? The list is short, and history proves it. Only three have consistently held value across centuries and civilisations:
1. Property – Land and real estate remain the backbone of generational wealth across empires, dynasties, and nations.
2. Gold – The universal store of value, recognised across every culture and era as money.
3. Fine art – A marker of cultural capital and scarcity, withstanding wars, inflation, and regime changes.
Everything else, from stocks to currencies, has had its cycles of boom and bust, but these three remain the enduring pillars of wealth preservation.
Conclusion
The message is clear: gold has outperformed, equities are struggling for momentum, and the dollar-credit backdrop is deteriorating. Advisors who continue to ignore gold—and the miners—are exposing clients to asymmetric downside. At some point the industry will be forced to adjust allocations, but by then the protection may already be gone.
There is no commission, at least no repeat commission selling gold. Also, the logistics, storage and insurance of physical deter - it's not super simple.
I complete agree with ' Herman ' ( below ) - Turkeys don't vote for Xmas , so it's not that surprising that theses alleged Investment Manager's will not be pointing their clients toward physical Gold & Silver anytime soon ....if ever . This said any number of them could easily have been cute enough to have seen the writing on the wall previously and been stacking for themselves
ever since .
So what do you think is the reason behind that Alasdair. Bigger profits for themselves springs to mind, or are the really that stupid?
As long as there is no commission for gold, no advisor will recommend it.
Treat Miners as trades and physical as your repository / base holdings. Only buy a miner, or indeed any other derivative, when it's ratioed performance against Gold, based on your trading timescale, is positive. Seems to be working for me so far this year.
One silly argument I heard from an investment adviser was that gold could go down considerably if the German Bundesbank has to sell their gold if the Euro defaults.
Could you explain as the dollar collapses, what will happen to stocks, ADRs and ETFs of gold and silver, of gold and silver miners, and of Chinese equities denominated in HKD and CHN. Many thanks for your wonderful work.
I.M.H.O. - Anything and everything denominated in the Dollar ( any Fiat Currency ) will have a supremely hard time of it . If HKD & CHN are both backed by metal prior to the up-coming collapse then it's a somewhat different story .