Gold Does Not Care About Your Growth Stocks
Through $4,000 an ounce while everyone argued about AI capex. The oldest trade on earth quietly had one of its best years ever.
While the market spent 2025 arguing about GPUs, gold went vertical. Through $3,500, then $4,000 an ounce, central banks buying like it is going out of style, which is ironic, because the entire thesis is that it never goes out of style.
The drivers are not mysterious: deficits nobody intends to fix, a Fed cutting into sticky inflation, geopolitics with a shipping-lane problem, and a global south that watched reserve assets get frozen and drew the obvious conclusion. None of that resolved this year. Most of it got worse.
What makes the move remarkable is who missed it: nearly everyone under 40. The degen generation treats gold like furniture. Meanwhile the barbarous relic outperformed most of the Nasdaq with none of the drawdowns and zero earnings calls. Sometimes the boomers are right. We will not be saying that again this quarter, so enjoy it.