Well... you did tell me to DYOR :) But you're right. I can trust...

Well... you did tell me to DYOR But you're right. I can trust that the people running the shop know far more about doing so than I and that they have been making a profit for a decent time now.

As to the gold price, well that depends mostly on the dollar price, I feel. There's a pretty handy carry trade working with USD at the moment on top of the usual flight to the 'safety' that it provides investors. So while that's happening, spot is not going to take off. Too much money going into USD

Further, get a chart out of the last 100 years. The only major tears we saw in XAU were during the great depression (inflation adjusted), the oil shocks (on top of Nixon closing the gold window) and the 10 years following 9/11 up to the currency crises. Even with that last period, the spot price was turbo charged by the 33% reduction in the value of USD over the period as measured by the USDX. So of the $1,560 tear from $260 to $1,825 perhaps a little over $500 was due to the weakness of the currency the price of gold was being measured against.

Look at the chart through that lens and instead of that $1,825 peak in 2011 followed by a year or so of consolidation leading to a 30%collapse in price, we see a still decent but more sedate rise to a top of around $1,300, followed by a period of consolidation and 20% drop in price to around $1,100 that correlates nicely with a 20% jump in the value of the USDX. Adjusting for all that, the price of gold had been remarkably stable from 2013 (end of the great recession and worst of the EU currency crisis) through to the pandemic, where trillions of dollars were spammed into the economy everywhere in a matter of months, spiking the cost of pretty much everything.

So it tells me that we really need seismic shifts to occur in order to see major, sustained rips in the gold prices. We did see some big moves in the last 20 years but a large proportion of all that has been due to large moves in the currency gold is really measured against. The rest involved banking system collapses, sovereign debt crises and locking the world down for two years. Other than that, yes, the price will go up over time, just as we would expect it should what with input costs and all, but not as dramatically as the charts would initially suggest. Will the inflation crisis result in another tear? Early indications suggest not.

Still... glad I stacked a little physical when we had parity back in 2012 or whenever. Got it for around $1,400 an ounce and think I even got a couple of coins at $1,300+something. Wish I'd stacked a little more but was starting to feel a bit like a tinfoil hat guy