Investing in gold in 2026: What to know

Welcome to our special The New Gold Standard. Gold, of course, has long been a place where investors go when they're seeking safety. Let's take a look back at the precious metals journey over the last several years. From December of 2019 to June of 2020, gold prices increased by $500 an ounce, with investors blocking the safety amid the pandemic. Then, if you fast forward to October of 2022, that then ended up marking the lowest price of gold in the 2020s so far at $1,656 per ounce. That pullback due to the Federal Reserve hiking interest rates to combat ongoing inflation. In October 2025, the price of gold climbed above $4,000 for the first time. And throughout all of 2025, gold saw its biggest annual gain since 1979. On January 26 of 2026, gold climbed above $5,000 per ounce for the first time. Wall Street is still bullish and has been doubling down on their calls for gold. You have J.P. Morgan that is predicting that gold will reach $6,300 by the end of the year, arguing that it's a strong portfolio hedge with the Middle East conflict, underscoring some of the drivers of higher gold prices, You also have Wells Fargo that's been bullish, bumping their price target this year to a range of $6,100 to $6,300. Goldman Sachs has said that it's a conviction buyer, placing their forecast to $5,400, with an upside risk from private sector diversification. So why all this optimism? It's a triple threat of demand. First, you've got central banks. Strategists are pointing to a structural shift as foreign central banks accumulate the precious metal. Central banks are less price sensitive than investors, and they're also sticky buyers. J.P. Morgan expects central banks to scoop up another 800 tons of gold in 2026 alone. Second, the anti-fiat trade. With policy uncertainty, geopolitical risks and tariffs in the headlines, investors are treating gold as a hedge against a debasement of fiat currencies. And third, the Fed. Markets are still pricing in rate cuts later this year, which is expected to put pressure on the dollar, and a lower dollar lowers the opportunity cost of holding non-yielding assets like gold. But what strategists are saying is that it will not be all in a straight line, Julie. We have seen quite a bit of volatility with gold this year. But still, as far as the gold trade is concerned, Wall Street says that that is still intact. Well, the first step when looking to invest in gold is choosing a form of gold to hold. Options include physical gold, gold mining stocks, gold ETFs, gold futures contracts. So owning physical gold is an important thing to understand. Globally, the gold market is an over-the-counter market, and this is where most of gold trading takes place. What you need to understand and what you need to appreciate when you're transacting in the space is understanding the shape, size, weight of the type of gold you're purchasing, and actually the physical element and what that means. That means you need to find a place to store it, you need to ensure the place to store it, and you need to deal with the logistics of moving it to and from that location for storage. That's probably the biggest element that people need to understand when they think about investing in gold. In addition, you may have to do a little more work to understand the pricing dynamic of what it is you're buying. If you're buying a coin or a bar, there may be a premium attached to the price that you regularly see in the media or on a screen. You just need to understand what that is and do a lot of good work to make sure that you're getting the right kind of pricing when you're looking to sell, not getting deep discounts. When it comes to jewelry, less liquid, but definitely something you could use if you're definitely looking at long-term store value. But I'd say that right now, if you're looking at the physical market, understanding the logistics of moving it and storing it is probably the key component. If you don't want to bother with the logistics of moving it and storing it, then you might go for something like a gold-backed ETF. GLD is the biggest of those. So walk us through what the advantages are there. Sure. These are really instruments that are well-designed, physically owning gold in a vault, doing all of the logistics I just talked to on your behalf for a management FIG. Simply put, as easy as buying or selling a stock is how you are buying and selling an exchange-traded fund that is owning physical gold. Where I think it's important for people to pay close attention is understanding specifically what the instrument's holding. Those that are fully backed, fully owning gold bars in a vault will track the price net of a cost that management FIG. And that's actually a very good proxy for owning gold. If you're looking at levered or inverse instruments or instruments that use derivatives or like you mentioned, maybe mining stocks, you won't get the same price performance that you're expecting if you're looking just at the gold price. A very liquid, very commonly used instrument and actually right now being adopted worldwide. This is what's really kind of exciting about the ETF space. Growing in China, growing in India as an instrument of owning gold versus the historical volumes of gold being bought into the physical space in those markets. But obviously very pronounced in terms of the U.S. presence. And what do people need to know about gold, the gold futures market? You know, we're talking about some of these ETFs do all kinds of different things. Some of them are physically backed, some of them own gold miners and some of them own some of the other instruments or people can invest in the futures directly as well. Well, the futures contract by design is a leveraged instrument. So if that's something that's interesting for you to obtain, then that's definitely something to take into consideration. But remember, these contracts have maturity dates. They roll and there is a cost that comes along with hitting that moment and making a decision to roll your contract. So you need to unpack that cost element of owning the future, but also understanding as a derivative of the instrument and due to some of the logistics themes that we've seen around the globe in recent years, they may trade at premiums to the spot price of gold. It's always been interesting to me how gold miners definitely don't trade one-to-one with gold prices, right? Sometimes they underperform by a lot, sometimes they outperform. So I guess people just really need to be aware of that if they're getting into those kinds of investments. They sure do. And actually, one of the themes that has been talked about over the last 18 months has simply been the speed with which the performance of the mining stocks is catching up to the underlying metal. That's because they're companies, they have balance sheets, they have business plans, they have lead times to get production into the market so that they can capitalize on the higher prices. But look, very interesting sector in the market, really exciting opportunity, but again, it's a company first and its performance is derived off of the underlying metals that they're actually extracting from the ground. So just know that that has implications when you're looking at truly tracking the gold price. And finally, however people want to invest in gold, if they are investing in it, is there sort of a rule of thumb for the role it should play in portfolio, the size of positions, that is good for most people? I know there's no one size fits all. The first thing I'd say is the structural shift from being kind of a tactical allocation or a short-term trade to more of a strategic asset, that's the key element here. People are looking and investors are considering on a global scale, how do I hedge my portfolio? You need to understand what it can do as a component of your portfolio, find the optimal allocation to maintain your performance and also see the benefits of the liquidity gold brings and the protection it can bring you as a unique diversifier in your portfolio. So keep your bonds, keep your equities, add gold to that and see how it actually impacts the overall performance. And on that curve, you'll find an optimal allocation ranging 2%, 5%, maybe even upwards to 10%. Again, thinking about it as a component of a portfolio. With the value of gold soaring, people are flocking to find out how much the items they have are worth. And there are some items in our everyday lives that actually do have gold in them. You could be sitting on a literal gold mine, or at least a gold thimble, depending on how much gold's in there. Senior reporter Brooke DePalma is here with me to take a closer look. So there's some stuff that's obvious, gold jewelry for example, very obvious, but then there's other stuff like technology that is much less obvious that actually has some gold in it. Yeah, let's start with something that a majority of Americans likely have, and that is the iPhone. So when you think about the iPhone, you probably don't think to yourself that there actually is gold in the iPhone, but there actually is. And right now what we know is that it's actually used in order to sort of prevent corrosion within the iPhone itself, but it actually only contains a very small amount. It's about 0.034 grams that are located within the iPhone. And so when you put that into context, it doesn't really equate to that much money worth of gold. It's only about $5.50. When we've seen the accessibility of gold items increase, sort of the iconic thing that we talk about is the Costco gold bar, right? And this actually launched back in October of 2023. We were chatting so much about it because when Costco came out and said this, that they were going to offer gold bars, it definitely got everyone's attention. But in addition to that, it also boosted their e-commerce sales. They only sell these gold bars online, but it's been interesting to watch over the past three years has this sort of evolved over time. And taking a look at the numbers, what we heard from Wells Fargo earlier was that this generates up to $200 million in sales each month. So people are definitely turning to Costco in order to get those gold bars. Now keep in mind, you have to be a Costco member to get this gold bar, but it also has been interesting how that sort of changed. When I first started covering this, it was about, you could order five total gold bars per a member. Now that has dropped to one transaction per a membership with a max of four units bought per 24 hours. So you buy one at a time in order to get this gold bar. But also when you think about just the context of how this pricing has evolved, when I covered this in September of 2024, a gold bar on Costco's website cost about $2,679. That has almost doubled or is about to double, it's moving higher.