Why Are the World’s Wealthiest Investors Stealthily Stockpiling Gold?

via Peter Reagan

This week, Your News to Know covers:

• Central banks have a new competitor for gold bullion
• Why are the wealthiest investors suddenly insisting on tangible, vaulted gold?
• State Street sees $10,000 gold as Fed’s desperate bluff continues
• You’re being sold digital gold. Are you going to buy it?

The rich aren’t just buying gold – they want their gold bars “on the shelf”

The UK’s leading business newspaper Financial Times published one of the more remarkable gold stories I’ve read this year. The headline is The year the rich went wild for gold (not currently paywalled).

As dramatic as the headline sounds, the details are even more interesting.

London bullion dealer Sharps Pixley says its underground vault is so full they’re looking for another site.

Swiss Gold Safe operates six vault locations, and its chief operating officer says every one of them needs to expand.

Renowned Swiss refiner and mint MKS PAMP is planning a substantial new facility aimed specifically at its wealthiest customers. And when I say “wealthiest,” for context, their current “white glove” service has a minimum purchase of $50 million. Yet demand is so high, and the purchases so massive, MKS PAMP intends its new facility for customers who buy gold bullion worth $200 million or more.

Don’t be misled – this isn’t really a story about rich people buying gold. We already knew wealthy families owned gold, and it’s honestly no surprise when truly wealthy people buy anything.

This is a story about two things:

• How much gold they’re accumulating
• What kind of gold they want (and why)

The FT tells us these customers increasingly insist on physical gold bars that are allocated and segregated. That means specific gold bullion bars assigned by serial number to their owner, and stored separately from others’ assets. Some even want the ability to visit their gold in person.

I find that distinction far more interesting than the dollar amounts, impressive as they are. When someone sets invests $50-$200 million in gold and then makes a point of asking, “Which bars are mine, exactly?” they’re telling us something about what they really value.

Not a price on a screen. Not a promise to pay, not a contract or a share of revenue.

Outright ownership of a specific, identifiable and tangible financial asset.

There are practical considerations here. Remember, physical gold bullion requires secure transportation, storage, security, insurance and auditing. Those are not trivial considerations – and explain, to some degree, the general preference for gold commodities futures or gold funds.

Today, though, a growing number of wealthy families have decided that only physical gold bullion will do.

The sheer scale of their buying is visible in the normally quiet business of vaulting. The FT report describes a “global race” for precious-metals storage from Switzerland to Singapore.

Here’s what’s so surprising about this – gold vaults are built to last generations. Gold takes up very little space, so an astonishing amount of value can be stored quite easily. At today’s prices, you could fit about $20 million in gold bars into a shoebox (but at 315 pounds, you wouldn’t be able to pick it up). That $200 million position we mentioned earlier? That takes up about as much space as a carry-on suitcase.

My point here is gold vaults don’t need a lot of space. The gold vault at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York opened in 1924 and hasn’t been expanded since. The Bank of England’s famous gold vaults were built about the same time – and today, they’re still the same size.

That’s what makes today’s scramble for additional vault space so striking. Gold is extraordinarily compact, and professional bullion vaults are built to accommodate enormous quantities of it for generations. When multiple operators start talking about running out of room all at once, demand has become difficult to ignore.

And this isn’t just a collection of anecdotes from vault operators. Physical gold demand has been surging recently.

According to World Gold Council data, physical gold purchases (categorized “OTC and other”) reached 570 metric tons in the first half of 2026 – the highest level in more than a decade, roughly one-fifth of total demand. That category includes private, off-exchange transactions that wealthy families often prefer.

There’s an interesting generational wrinkle, too.

The FT cites an HSBC survey that found wealthy Gen Z investors typically held about 50% more gold than their baby-boomer counterparts. “Gold could end 2026 as Gen Z’s leading non-cash asset,” the survey noted.

One wealth management executive told the newspaper some families he works with hold a quarter or even a third of their wealth in gold.

That’s not to suggest anyone copy those allocations simply because wealthy people are doing it. “Rich people are doing it” is an insufficient reason to make any financial decision.

But I do think their behavior is worth considering.

Since 2022, the dominant gold-demand story has been central banks accumulating gold bullion.

Now we’re watching a parallel story develop among the world’s wealthiest investors.

These are very different groups with very different circumstances. Yet their preferences sound surprisingly similar.

• They want physical gold bullion
• They want to know where it is
• They want to know which gold belongs to them – in the words of one executive, “They want it on a shelf”

Now, I’m sure you’re aware of gold’s safe haven reputation. We can speculate on the motives behind this massive surge in physical gold demand endlessly – but we don’t have to.

That, to me, may be the most important part of the whole story.

Gold has been money for thousands of years. Yet at a time when almost everything else in our financial lives is becoming more abstract, more digitized and more dependent on institutions and technology, the people with the greatest freedom to choose are moving in the opposite direction.

They don’t want a digital token, or a commodities contract, or profit-sharing with a gold mining company – they don’t want financial exposure to the price of gold.

Today, what they want is the gold bars themselves.

That’s an enormous change, and believe me, I’ll be watching this story very closely.

Back in January, my colleague Phillip Patrick reported on contracts for COMEX physical gold delivery surging 250% over the prior year. At the time, we didn’t know why this was happening – only that it was.

Today, I think we finally figured out where a lot of that gold ended up…

State Street sees a path to $5,500 gold this year (and, eventually, $10,000)

The second story is not a news report so much as a strategist’s forecast – and forecasts deserve to be treated as forecasts.

Still, the reasoning behind this one is worth examining.

Aakash Doshi, Head of Gold Strategy at State Street Investment Management, told Kitco that State Street sees roughly $5,000-$5,250 gold price as a reasonable target, with a broader range of $4,750-$5,500 into early winter.

His longer-term view is much more dramatic. Doshi described $10,000 gold as a question of “when, not if.”

Sound absurd? What interests me is his explanation.

Doshi points to the same structural pressures we’ve discussed for years: enormous government debt, persistent deficits, concerns about purchasing power and declining confidence in fiscal discipline. He says those underlying forces matter more to gold’s long-term direction than whatever the Federal Reserve says at its next meeting.

I think that distinction is useful.

The price of gold can move sharply in either direction because traders reinterpret a central banker’s sentence, an inflation report or expectations for interest rates.

But that’s the short-term story.

The long-term story is much simpler: Can heavily indebted governments resolve their fiscal problems without further eroding the purchasing power of their currencies?

The short answer, very likely, is no.

Granted, I don’t know where gold will trade next week, much less several years from now. Trust me, neither does anyone else, no matter how much they wave their arms and pound the table.

Prices move all the time. Every day. As investing legend Ben Graham said, in the short term, prices are a voting machine. Nothing more.

Trends, though, are much slower to unfold and much more powerful. Their very scope and speed makes them hard to see in real-time. In the long term, Graham says, prices are a weighing machine.

Over the long haul, I believe gold will at least continue its post-1971 trajectory of 8% average growth annually. Simply because I don’t see any essential changes working to counter that trend. I tend to agree that $10,000 gold is a matter of when rather than if. Whether that price comes next year or 20 years from now, though, is much more meaningful to investors today.

Yes, digital gold solves one problem (while creating several others)

Forbes recently published an argument for “tokenized” (digital) gold. First, we should note that the author Mauricio Di Bartolomeo is co-founder of a tokenized-gold trading company. So it’s far from independent reporting – but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.

Now, his basic case is reasonable.

Physical gold bullion can be inconvenient to move, divide and transact with. Granted – by the way, this is why, throughout human history, silver coins were used much more frequently than gold coins for everyday transactions. Gold’s value is just too high for regular use. (It’s called the “small coin problem.” Imagine if you had to pay for everything, groceries and gas and drinks on Friday night, with nothing but $100 bills – and nobody offered change.)

A digital gold token, though, backed by vaulted bullion, can make around-the-world transactions easier. True, convenience has value.

But that very convenience changes the nature of the arrangement.

With physical gold bullion, the central question is fairly straightforward: Who owns this gold, and where is it? Who has custody of it? Is it redeemable? Is it even there?

Tokenized gold adds additional layers of custody and complexity. You have to trust the issuer, the technology, the existing custody arrangements, auditing and recordkeeping – and of course whatever rules govern redemption of the token for metal.

To be fair, some digital gold providers go to considerable lengths to address those concerns. Some back their tokens with allocated physical bullion and publish regular reserve reports.

The question isn’t whether every digital gold arrangement is unsound.

The question is whether convenience is the reason you wanted gold in the first place.

And that brings us right back to the Financial Times story: A growing number of the wealthiest gold owners in the world are apparently willing to pay extra for the opposite of convenience.

They want specific gold bars. They want those bars segregated from everyone else’s. Sometimes they want to visit them.

At the exact same moment, another corner of the financial world is working hard to make gold digital. I believe that’s a fundamentally misguided effort.

Sure, both approaches can serve different purposes. But they are not equivalent forms of ownership.

For anyone considering gold for their savings, understanding that distinction matters.

Because before deciding how to own gold, it helps to understand exactly what it is about gold that you wanted to own in the first place. If you want convenience? If you want to go to 7-11 and buy your Snickers and Coke with gold, I’m afraid the team at Birch Gold Group cannot help you.

If, on the other hand, you (like the wealthiest investors) want to own tangible physical assets outright – assets you can see and touch – securely, vaulted and insured and guarded for the long haul – then Birch Gold Group can help. Learn more about the benefits of physical precious metals ownership.