It’s a fair question: in a world of algorithmic trading, tokenised assets, and instant global markets, why would anyone still hold a metal that just sits in a vault?

The answer hasn’t really changed in decades, even if the market around it has. Gold doesn’t generate income, doesn’t grow earnings, and doesn’t benefit from innovation the way a stock can. What it does is hold value independent of any single currency, government, or financial institution — which is exactly the quality that matters most when everything else in a portfolio is correlated to the same economic cycle.

We saw this play out again over the past 18 months. As equity markets moved through a stretch of higher volatility, client portfolios with a meaningful precious metals allocation held up noticeably better on a risk-adjusted basis than those without one. Gold didn’t outperform equities in the good months — it wasn’t supposed to. Its job was to soften the bad ones, and it did.

The mistake we see most often isn’t investors ignoring gold — it’s investors treating it as an all-or-nothing bet rather than a portfolio component. A 5-10% allocation, sized appropriately to your broader strategy, tends to do the diversification job without dragging on long-term growth. Going heavier than that starts to work against you in strong bull markets; going lighter often means the hedge isn’t meaningful enough to matter when you need it.

The other shift worth noting is access. Physical ownership used to mean either storing metal yourself or trusting a third party you couldn’t fully verify. Independently audited, insured storage — the kind we use for every client holding — has closed that gap, making physical precious metals a genuinely practical allocation rather than a logistical headache.

Gold isn’t a growth strategy. It never was. But as a stabiliser inside a portfolio built for the long term, it’s held its ground for a very long time — and 2026 hasn’t given us a reason to think that changes.