Gold’s surge through $4000 has also taken it above £3000 per troy ounce for the first time. This reflects a sudden and very real rush among investors.
September was the strongest month for new account openings on BullionVault since the peak of 2020’s Covid crisis.
October has now made the 5th best start to any month in BullionVault’s 20 years of operation. The first seven days brought more first-time users than the full-month average over the past three years.
There’s definitely an element of FOMO in gold’s current surge. Gold was already the best-performing asset of the 21st century to date, and 2025 is gold’s strongest year since the 1970s. Now establishment names like Morgan Stanley are telling investors that they don’t own enough gold, and that’s spurred a rush among private banks to catch up (no doubt led by clients demanding to know why they’re not more heavily invested), resulting in massive inflows to gold-backed ETF trust funds.
Among investors wanting to own physical bullion at low cost with 24/7 trading, we’re seeing many new users starting to buy gold with small sums on BullionVault. But there’s a more dramatic jump in larger customers, with the number of first-time purchases worth over £100,000 running five times greater than the average level of the past 52 weeks so far in October.
In our experience, larger allocations tend to be very sticky, because they represent a determined move to buy gold as a form of portfolio insurance. While short-term profit taking can’t be ruled out, it’s likely that the surge in gold investment will hold firm as political, fiscal and financial uncertainty deepens.
For reference, people who first bought gold on BullionVault in 2025 accounted for 8.0% of all gold owners at the start of last month, but they accounted for 13.4% of September’s sellers, clearing a profit on average of more than £150 for every £1,000 invested.
