Gold Investing Loses 4-Year High as Monthly Price Drops 1st Time in 2025
Tuesday, 8/05/2025 13:09
Sentiment still firmly positive amid Trump's latest chaos...
GOLD INVESTING sentiment fell in July at the fastest pace since spring 2024, retreating from the highest level in four years as gold prices edged back for the first time in 2025,
writes Adrian Ash at world-leading precious metals marketplace BullionVault.
But while gold investing sentiment has fallen hard as summer begins, it remains solidly positive. A rise in profit-taking last month was offset by ongoing strength in first-time investing, with the number of new account openings on BullionVault running at twice the level of July last year.
The
Gold Investor Index tracks the number of people buying gold on BullionVault over those who sold across the month. Any reading above 50.0 signals that gold buyers outnumbered sellers.
This unique measure of revealed preference fell in July to 54.2, down 2.7 points from
June's 48-month high on the Gold Investor Index with the sharpest 1-month drop since March 2024. That put the Gold Investor Index back in line with its medium- and longer-term average of 54.5.
Rising sharply mid-month, the Dollar price of gold ended July with just a $10 gain and slipped to $3338 per Troy ounce on its monthly average, down 0.3% from June's average.
That marked gold's smallest month-average change so far this year and also its first month-average drop since December.
That small drop in prices saw the Gold Investor Index move in the same direction as gold's month-average Dollar price for the 4th time in a row, matching the 2016 run-up to the UK's Brexit referendum with the longest stretch of co-movement since mid-2014.
The index has now read above 50.0 for 16 months running. During that time, the price of gold has set 10 new month-average records in US Dollars, 12 in Euros and 13 in UK Pounds.
So with the chaos of Trump's policy-making putting a floor beneath gold's uptrend, retail investment has broken out of
the price-sensitivity which it showed between the pandemic and last fall's US election.
New account openings worldwide in 2025 have already overtaken each of the previous three full years. Yet private investors in the USA continue to lag the rest of the West in turning to gold. Whether through political affiliation or focusing on stocks and crypto instead, that leaves retail investors in the world's largest economy still to catch up as US data suddenly sours.
Finding 9-in-10 of its global client base in Western Europe and North America, BullionVault saw the number of first-time investors slip 8.5% in July from June's count, coming 1/3rd below April's 50-month high (-35.6%). That was, however, still more than twice the number of July last year (+102.9%) and it marked the 4th strongest July since BullionVault launched in 2005, behind only the Covid pandemic of 2020, the Brexit shock of 2016, and the global financial crisis of 2011.
With Germany up 201.3% and the UK up 138.0% compared to last July, the number of new bullion investors living in the USA rose only 28.6% from the same month in 2024, the weakest rise of any major market.
By weight meantime, and net of investor demand, BullionVault clients as a group sold 0.1% of their gold, edging the total now secured and insured in each client's choice of London, New York, Singapore, Toronto or Zurich back beneath 44.0 tonnes. By value, those holdings rose to a new month-end record above $4.6 billion (£3.5bn, €4.0bn, ¥702bn).
Silver demand in contrast was positive by weight, reversing 1 tonnes of June's near 9-tonne liquidation despite the price of the more industrially-useful precious metal rising 4.8% to its highest Dollar average since September 2011 at $37.67 per ounce (and making a new UK Pound record at £27.89 plus a new Euro lifetime high at €32.25 per Troy ounce).
With that small inflow taking BullionVault client holdings just above 1,152 tonnes worth a record $1.3bn at month-end (a new record £1.0bn, €1.1bn, ¥202bn), the Silver Investor Index rose 1.1 points from June's 6-month low to read 51.6.
So with fears of recession and hopes for US rate cuts inviting new inflows to precious metals, domestic issues such as Europe's economic slowdown are helping support demand.
But price action over the past week shows how Trump is really driving global bullion trading. Gold thrives on uncertainty, and
Donald Trump's second presidency continues to wrong-foot financial markets as much as it does America's trading and political partners.
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