Western Gold Investing Hits 4-Year High as Underlying Bull Run Continues
Tuesday, 7/01/2025 13:55
Gold price uptrend strongest since 2011...
GOLD's latest rise to fresh record prices saw private investing jump in June, with buyers outnumbering sellers by the widest margin in 4 years,
reports Adrian Ash at world-leading marketplace BullionVault.
Users of our fintech platform − now owning a record $6 billion in precious metals between them, and 9-in-10 of whom live in Western Europe or North America − also bought over a quarter-tonne more gold in June than they sold, the largest net inflow since July 2022.
Smashing daily records this spring, gold meanwhile continued trending higher, with its underlying price setting fresh all-time highs as the second half of 2025 begins.
In US Dollar terms, gold rose 2.3% on a month-average basis, setting its 6th new all-time high in a row at $3352 per Troy ounce with the longest unbroken stretch of gains in 14 years.
Gold's rise was more muted for non-Dollar investors as
the US currency sank to multi-year lows on the FX market. But priced in UK Pounds, gold has now risen on a month-average basis 12 times in a row − the longest run in almost two decades − and it's risen 11 times in the past year for Euro investors, matching the record Euro-price strength of 2009-2010, when the Western banking crisis morphed into the Eurozone debt crisis.
Now private investors in the West are buying into another bull market in gold, joining central banks and Asian wealth in building their holdings as the geopolitical and economic shock of Trump's return to the White House persists.
Including new users of BullionVault − where account openings continue to run at post-pandemic highs − the number of investors who ended last month with more gold than they began it rose 12.0% from May's figure, while the number of net sellers fell by 7.5%.
Together, that pushed up the global Gold Investor Index by 1.4 points to 56.9, the highest since June 2021 and rising above
2022's equities-slump and
European-fiscal panic peaks.
A reading of 50.0 on this unique sentiment measure would signal a perfect balance between the number of buyers and sellers.
But while gold investing is making a comeback among Western households after the profit-taking of recent months and years, it remains far from the one-way street of the pandemic or the global financial crisis.
Most notably, US bullion demand continues to lag Western Europe, staying cautious on safe-haven gold as the Dollar sinks and risk assets rise to new all-time highs of their own.
Yes, new investing in precious metals rose again last month, with June setting the 2nd highest count of first-time BullionVault users since March 2021.
In fact, all of BullionVault's top 10 national markets saw the count of first-time users rise compared to May, when the global total fell by one-third (-37.2%) from April's 50-month record.
But while the number of new account openings in June topped its 5-year monthly average by 47.0% across the Eurozone and by 45.6% in the UK, it remained 7.9% below that figure in the USA.
Perhaps US investing was distracted by the S&P500 index finally rising to set a new high of its own as the first half of 2025 drew to a close, albeit gaining only 5.7% year-to-date.
Indeed, among major asset classes, gold was topped only by copper (+27.4% on CME futures) and German equities (36.6% total returns on the Dax in USD terms), gaining 26.0% since New Year's Eve with
gold's strongest calendar 6 months since the 2nd half of 2007...
...back
when the global financial crisis began...
...and the strongest first-half
since 1980 for gold, when Cold War turmoil sent gold leaping to what proved a near 3-decade big top.
By weight, this June's heavy net gold demand on BullionVault (256 kilograms) took client holdings to a 3-month high above 44.0 tonnes − worth a record $4.6bn (£3.4bn, €3.9bn, JP¥671bn) − trimming the net outflow across the first 6 months of the year to just 0.2% (108kg).
Silver holdings also set a new record by value at $1.3bn (£972m, €1.1bn, JP¥192bn), as did PGMs at $107 million (£78m, €91m, JP¥15bn).
But the industrially-useful precious metals all saw heavy profit-taking by weight, as silver made its steepest month-average price rise since April 2024, up 9.9% in Dollar terms (+7.6% in EUR), with
platinum prices up 21.5% (18.9% in EUR) and palladium rising 8.1% (5.9% in EUR).
The Silver Investor Index fell 2.5 points to 50.5, its lowest reading since January's sub-50 level of 49.7 and dramatically below
April's silver investing spike on Trump's trade tariffs shock when the price went tumbling.
That price drop proved brief, however, and silver bullion investing has fallen back as ETF trust funds swell and speculative betting grows in the derivatives market.
Gold investing, in contrast, has now shown co-movement with rising gold prices for 2 months in a row and for 3 of the past 6 months in total. That's the strongest positive connexion between gold prices and
BullionVault's Gold Investor Index since late 2011.
But like the quiet, underlying uptrend in gold prices shown in late-spring 2025, today's strong but more measured pace of new investor demand suggests that there's little danger of this bull market blowing out anytime soon.
After all, gold's month-average price has now risen twice in a row since
April's $3500 one-day gold spike. None of
gold's 5 big tops in modern history were followed by one, let alone two, new underlying highs.
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