Late to what?

Most investors carry the memory of one that got away. The stock you studied, nearly bought, and then set aside because it had already run so far. You watched it climb without you, and the watching taught you a quiet lesson you may not have noticed you learned: that a thing which has already risen is a thing you have missed, and chasing it now would be foolish. It is a fair instinct about a trade, and a poor guide for almost everything else.

Gold has put a version of that feeling in front of a lot of people lately. It climbed to records, then slipped well off the highs, and the reaction I hear most is some form of "the run is over, I missed it, why buy now near the top." It is a natural thing to feel. It is also, I think, the wrong question pointed at the wrong kind of asset.

The question only makes sense for a bet

"Did I miss it?" is a question you ask about a trade, something you bought hoping to sell higher. Ask it of a speculation and it is fair. Ask it of protection and it dissolves. Nobody stands in a hardware store deciding against a smoke alarm because the price of smoke alarms rose last year. Nobody declines home insurance because premiums went up. You do not buy those things to win; you buy them to be covered, and their entry price is close to beside the point.

A protective holding in gold belongs in that second category. The reason to own a slice of it was never to out-run equities; over the long sweep, stocks have compounded faster, and they should. The reason is what gold does to the rest of your wealth in the moments that matter most.

What you are actually buying

In an ordinary year, gold drifts along with little correlation to your stocks, which is mildly useful and easy to ignore. Its real work shows up in a crash. When fear takes hold, the correlations among everything you own tend to rush toward one: equities, property, high-yield credit, much of what was sold to you as diversified falls together, in the same week, precisely when you needed it to behave differently. Gold has a long habit of doing the opposite, holding or rising while the rest sinks. That is the property you are paying for. Not appreciation. Behaviour.

It will test your patience along the way. Gold has a maddening habit of sitting still exactly when you expect it to move, then running hard when you have stopped watching. That habit is the asset being itself, and it is beside the point in any case. You hold this for the very long term, not as something to check against the headlines each quarter. Pierre Lassonde, the Canadian mining figure who has spent a lifetime around the metal, has said he buys gold hoping never to sell it, but to pass it to his grandchildren. That is the time horizon the asset rewards.

Seen that way, the sharp climb and the pullback do useful work; they demonstrate the very thing you are buying. An asset that can move that far on its own schedule, decoupled from your portfolio, is showing you exactly the independence that makes it worth holding. That independence, volatility and all, is the case itself.

How high can it go?

People often ask me how high the gold price can climb, and I have come to answer with another question: how low can the purchasing power of a currency fall? They are the same question in different clothes. An ounce of gold is an ounce; its weight and its nature never change. What moves is the quantity of dollars, pounds, or euros it takes to buy that ounce. So a rising gold price is largely a falling currency, measured against something that holds still. Read that way, "how high can it go" stops sounding like a ceiling to fear and starts sounding like a question about how much faith you place in the money on the other side of the trade. That idea deserves an article of its own, and one day it will get one.

The limits, because they make the point stronger

I will not overstate it, and a serious reader would not let me. Gold pays no income, so it is a diversifier and a tail-risk hedge, not a replacement for your bonds. Its correlation to stocks is roughly zero on average, reliably negative only in stress, and it can even turn positive in a roaring equity rally. The safe-haven effect can be short-lived. The case is never "sell everything and buy gold"; it is "hold a slice alongside the rest," and the research that supports a measured allocation is the same research that warns against overdoing it.

Here is why the price level barely touches that logic. If a sensible starting position is a single-digit percentage of your wealth, held for the way it behaves over years and crises, then whether you began near a high or a low matters far less than whether you began at all. You are not timing a trade. You are taking out a policy. I will not pretend to know where the price sits three or six months from now; no one does, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing with confidence. The longer arc is easier to reason about. As long as currencies are run by central bankers with a printing press and every incentive to use it, the supply of money tends in one direction, and gold is measured in that money. That is a view rather than a promise, and past moves guarantee nothing. But it is not a stretch to see which way the long road runs.

Timing the wrong thing

There is a deeper reason the timing question misfires here. Picture someone who timed it perfectly, who bought gold at its lowest and watched it climb. If that gold sits in a brokerage account inside their own country, inside their own banking system, they have won a trade and bought none of the protection that counts when it counts: when accounts are frozen, when a transfer suddenly needs permission, when a programmable rule decides what your money may do, or when a government reaches for emergency powers it has already shown it will use. The benefit this whole site is about, metal in your name, in a private vault outside your jurisdiction, beyond the reach of a freeze or a programmable rule, has nothing to do with the price they paid. Market timing polishes the one variable that barely matters and ignores the one that decides everything. A protective holding is judged by where it sits and whose reach it lies beyond. The entry price is almost a footnote.

Put the two side by side. Would you rather hold gold bought at today's price, in your name in a private vault beyond any single government's reach, or gold bought a decade ago for a fraction of the cost, sitting in an account where a programmable rule could one day decide what you may do with it? The one who paid more and holds it safely is, by every measure that matters here, in the stronger position.

So set aside whether you missed something. The only question that decides anything is the same one it always was: is a meaningful part of your wealth protected, in your name and beyond reach, or is it not? If it is not, the price on the screen this morning is a distraction from a decision that was never really about the price. When you want to look at it that way, I am here.

This article is informational and does not constitute financial, legal or tax advice, and past performance is no guarantee of future results. The right allocation depends entirely on the individual. Speak with us about your specific circumstances before making any decision.

Sources & further reading

Baur, D. G. & Lucey, B. M. (2010), "Is Gold a Hedge or a Safe Haven? An Analysis of Stocks, Bonds and Gold," The Financial Review 45(2). The standard reference for the hedge versus safe-haven distinction. World Gold Council, "The relevance of gold as a strategic asset (2025): Diversification." World Gold Council, "Key attributes of gold: Diversification." World Gold Council, "The portfolio continuum: rethinking gold and alternatives in investing."

The fuller reading and allocation ranges sit in How much gold? Past performance is no guarantee of future results.