Is It Too Late to Buy Gold?

Gold has jumped from sleepy sideshow to dominant market narrative in a short span of time. For years, owning gold did not move the needle, and only introduced unnecessary noise to investors’ portfolios. Then, in 2023, things started silently shifting in the background. Today, after a parabolic mid-summer move followed by a short correction, investors are now asking themselves: is it too late to buy gold?

Before we answer that question, if you’d rather watch the video version of this blog, make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel and check out our latest episode on this very same topic:

Having gotten that out of the way, let’s begin.

The Shock That Changed Central Banks

To answer whether investors should consider gold as an investment in today’s environment, I invited Mike Philbrick, CEO of Resolve Asset Management Global, to explain to us the fundamentals behind gold investing. If we could understand the reason behind this ongoing gold rush, we might be able to peek into the future.

One of the more shocking pieces of information that he revealed is that the gold story did not start in 2023; it started with central banks in February 2022, when the US, EU and G7 countries froze the central bank assets of Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. For decades, reserves held in US Treasuries had been treated as the ultimate safe asset. After the invasion, the world realized that if their reserves could be immobilized by single government, they were not fully sovereign to begin with. This began a buying spree among central banks to bid up assets that were fully accessible and globally recognized as a store of value.

Enter gold.

As a non-liability reserve, held in vaults you could control, gold experienced a steady, structural demand as the world reassessed what “safe” meant all along.

The Feature is the Bug

A common objection to gold is that it does not produce income. So even when trying to examine whether this metal is a “buy”, there are no coupons or dividends to model to determine intrinsic value. For investors trained to value assets based on cash flows, this feels like a bit of a stretch!

When talking to Mike, one thing became clear: “The lack of cashflows is not the bug, it’s the feature.” It’s the structural reason why it is so potent for portfolio diversification. Gold does not depend on any issuer’s solvency. It is not exposed to dividend cuts or refinancing risk. As Mike put it, “it doesn’t have a cash flow, but it’s not printable either.” Someone has to sell you existing metal; nobody can conjure new above-ground supply at will.

From a portfolio perspective, this makes gold behave differently from traditional financial assets. It does not move with earnings revisions like equities, and it is not tied directly to default risk like credit. Over very long horizons, gold has roughly preserved purchasing power. In some crisis regimes, it has generated positive returns when both stocks and bonds struggled. It is not a perfect hedge, but its return pattern is distinct enough that even a modest allocation can change how a portfolio behaves across inflation and policy regimes.

But It’s Overbought!

“Overbought doesn’t mean over. It means it’s a strong, strong trend.” While Mike reaffirmed that investing in strong asset has paid over the long term, that doesn’t makes the recent chart less unnerving. Gold’s price has had an almost straight-up phase. Assets that move like that often experience sharp reversals, and it is reasonable to be wary of buying after a big spike.

The key is to separate two ideas. Prices can overshoot in the short term, and yet the deeper reasons to own an asset can remain intact. Even if gold corrects from here, the forces that have supported it—central bank rebalancing, high debt loads, inflation uncertainty and geopolitical tension—may not disappear overnight.

That is why the better question is not “Will it crash?” but “What role, if any, should gold play in my portfolio, and how do I want to own it?” Once the focus shifts from timing to role, the decision becomes less about guessing the next spike or crash and more about building a portfolio that can handle a range of futures.

Strategic Versus Tactical Gold

For most investors, there are two sensible ways to hold gold.

One is strategic. You treat gold as a small, permanent sleeve in your policy portfolio. You acknowledge that it will have long stretches of dull or negative performance and occasional bursts of strength. You size it so that you can live with that pattern, and you accept that its job is diversification and regime protection, not maximizing short-term returns.

The other is tactical and rules-based. You view gold as a position you want when it is in an uptrend and less of (or none) when it is not. You are not pretending to know intrinsic value; you are using price behavior as a risk-management and allocation tool.

Maybe even blend both! Keeping a modest strategic allocation and then allowing a tactical sleeve to expand or contract around it.

A Measured Answer to “Too Late?”

So, is it too late to buy gold? No one can say with certainty what the price will do next year. What we can say is that the backdrop pushing investors toward gold—central bank reserve shifts, high and rising debt, inflation volatility and geopolitical friction—is unlikely to vanish because the chart looks steep.

Gold will not fix every risk in a portfolio. It will not always move when you hope it will. But in a world where the safety of financial assets depends increasingly on policy and politics, there is a coherent case for giving gold a defined, disciplined role (whether strategic or tactical).

The real decision is not whether you can perfectly time your entry. It is whether a small slice of something that is “not printable” deserves a seat alongside your stocks and bonds, and what rules you are willing to commit to so that you can hold it through the next cycle without flinching at every headline.