Should You Buy Gold In 2026?

In January gold hit $5,589 an ounce. The highest price in human history, and the first time it

ever cleared its 1980 peak in real inflation adjusted money.

Then it broke. Today it’s around $4,060.

Most people see a top. I see a sale.

Everything that made gold worth owning in January is still true in July. Only the price moved.

Why It Fell

The 30 year Treasury pushed above 5 percent. Gold pays you nothing, so when a

government bond pays five, holding a metal that pays zero costs you something real.

The dollar firmed up, which makes the same ounce more expensive for every buyer outside

America.

The war premium drained out. January’s high was built on the Iran escalation. The ceasefire

signals came and the fear left the price.

What A Correction Looks Like

In 2008, gold fell 34 percent. In the exact year the financial crisis proved every argument

gold investors had been making for a decade.

When margin calls hit, people sell what they can rather than what they’d like to. Gold is

liquid, so gold goes first. Then it nearly tripled.

The whole 2001 to 2011 run took gold from $250 to $1,920, with 15 to 20 percent pullbacks

every couple of years along the way. Routine.

Twenty seven percent is normal. It’s the toll you pay to be in the trade.

Who Bought The Crash

In June, gold broke below $4,000 and posted its worst month since 2008. Western investors

dumped into the low.

China’s central bank bought more gold that month than in any month in two and a half years.

Its twentieth straight month of buying.

They weren’t alone. Poland has been the most aggressive accumulator in the world, working

through a multi year plan to reach 700 tonnes. Uzbekistan, Turkey and India keep adding.

Central banks that have been absent from this market for decades are quietly showing up

again.

Here’s what people miss. Gold is still under 10 percent of China’s reserves. For major

Western holders it’s closer to 70 percent. Closing that gap takes decades.

So the biggest buyer in the market has no opinion on the price. It has a mandate and a

mandate has no stop loss.

Every previous gold bull market was priced by investors deciding how they felt. This one has

a buyer underneath it that shows up every month regardless.

The Float Nobody Talks About

India runs 11 to 13 million weddings a year, and gold is the settlement layer at all of them.

What’s given to a bride is legally hers. In a country where formal banking is out of reach for

millions, that jewellery is a woman’s own balance sheet.

Indian households hold an estimated 25,000 tonnes between them. Eleven percent of all the

gold ever mined, in private hands, in one country. More than triple the official reserves of

the United States.

India isn’t alone in this. Turkish weddings run on gold sets given to the bride and Turkish

families have used gold to survive their own currency for generations. Vietnam has imported

more gold per head than China or India, because people there trust metal over the dong.

Chinese households bought record amounts this year. Across most of Asia and the Middle East, gold is savings rather than a trade.

People look at total above ground supply and assume it’s an overhang waiting to be sold.

Central bank reserves don’t get sold. Family gold doesn’t get sold. It gets passed down.

Price is set by the thin slice actually willing to trade and that slice gets thinner every year as

more metal moves into hands that measure holding periods in generations.

Twenty Two Metres

All the gold ever mined comes to about 216,000 tonnes. Melt it into one block and you get a

cube 22 metres a side. Three swimming pools. Roughly 27 grams per person alive.

Mines add about 1.5 percent a year, and it’s slowing as the easy deposits run out.

Gold doesn’t rust, so nearly all of it still exists. The atoms in a wedding band have probably

been a Roman coin.

You can’t make more either.

It’s forged in neutron star collisions, which is an absurd sentence and also just true.

The Math With No Exit

US public debt is around $39.6 trillion, growing about ten billion dollars a day.

The average rate on existing US debt is roughly 3.4 percent. New 30 year paper is being

issued above 5.

Every cheap old bond that matures gets refinanced at the expensive new rate. The interest

bill compounds on its own, with nobody voting on it. It already runs over a trillion a year,

more than the entire defence budget.

There are three ways out. Grow out of it, default, or inflate it away. Nobody defaults, and nobody has produced that kind of growth in fifty years.

So gold supply grows 1.5 percent a year and can’t be increased by decision, while dollar

supply expands to service a debt that grows by itself.

I’m not calling for a collapse. Something more boring and more certain is happening: the

slow, permanent erosion of what a dollar buys.

The Scoreboard

Since 2000, gold is up roughly 1,388 percent. The S&P 500 is up about 420 percent on

price. Add dividends back and the gap narrows, but it holds.

A rock with no earnings, no buybacks and no board of directors beat the best equity market

in history over a quarter century.

How Can You Buy It

Five options, running from the most direct to the most leveraged.

Bars and coins from a dealer. The oldest version. You hold the metal in your hand. You also

handle storage, insurance, and the spread when you sell.

Physically-backed gold through a brokerage. Fractional ownership of real bullion sitting

with a custodian, bought and sold like a stock.

Gold ETFs. The simplest exposure. Liquid, cheap, easy to size inside a registered account.

Miners. Leverage on the metal. Their costs are broadly fixed, so a 30 percent move in gold

can move earnings far more. It cuts both ways.

Royalty and streaming companies. They fund mines for a permanent cut of production, so they get the metal and the exploration upside while somebody else eats the cost overruns. Toll booths.

Physical is the foundation for me. No counterparty, no promise from anyone.

I personally buy physically-backed gold on Wealthsimple. Fractional ownership of real bullion

held with their custodian, from a dollar, trading 24/7. Fee per trade, no ongoing storage cost,

holdable in a TFSA or RRSP, and redeemable for Royal Canadian Mint coins from a non

registered account.

How I Buy It

I have no idea where the bottom is, and neither does anyone handing you a price target. So I

schedule instead of guessing.

Automated, regardless of the chart.

Someone who started at the exact top in January has been buying all the way down. Their

average sits well below the high, and they never had to be right about anything.

Stop trying to be right. Start being consistent.

Three rules. Never use leverage on something that can fall 30 percent inside a bull market.

Size it as insurance. Think in 2035, act monthly.

What Would Change My Mind

Central banks turning net sellers for several quarters running. China’s streak breaking and

staying broken. Real yields running high while inflation genuinely falls. Washington finding a

credible path back to surplus.

Those are structural, and I’d respect them. A red chart isn’t one of them.

Where That Leaves Us

Gold is 27 percent off its high, which is an average correction inside a bull market.

The largest buyers on earth accelerated into the decline. Metal keeps moving from people

who trade it to people who inherit it. Supply grows 1.5 percent while the debt behind the

world’s reserve currency compounds on its own.

Every buyer that matters kept buying. The price went down anyway.

That gap is the opportunity, and it won’t stay open.

Most people will find gold in the next panic, on a green chart, paying up. You’re looking at it

now, in the quiet part.

Stay sharp.

Research and opinion for education, not financial advice. I hold positions in several assets

discussed. Do your own research, size for survival, never invest money you can’t afford to

lose.