Gold: 'You're Not Bullish Enough'

Bond yields up, gold prices leap...

REMEMBER when, last year, Donald Trump's return to the White House saw gold blow past analyst and investor forecasts day after day after day? asks Adrian Ash at BullionVault.

Looks like the metal has the same message again.

"You're not bullish enough. No one is."

Month-to-date, and excluding this January's mania, the price of gold in US Dollars is heading for its steepest leap since the historic jump of September 1999.

Gold that month rose 17.3% in the mother of all short squeezes, soaring after the central banks of Europe...

...cornered by the UK Government's cack-handed gold sales announcement that May...

...signed the first Central Bank Gold Agreement at the IMF's annual meeting in Washington, declaring in advance how much they would sell over the next 5 years and also promising not to lend any more gold to the mining industry so that it could keep speculating against its own product.

The news crushed then-major producer Ashanti, flipping $230 million of 'hedge book' gains into $450m of speculative losses for the Ghana miner.

The wider gold mining industry also got whacked, having sold forwards some 18 months of total global production after letting sensible hedging become outright speculation.

Here in August 2026, in contrast, there's been no short squeeze...

...neither of the miners (they don't hedge anymore, thanks both to the 1999 shock and the relentless bull market which followed)...

...nor of hedge funds either. Because the hot money's bearish betting has, across this summer, averaged pretty much the lowest since the Covid Chaos of 2020.

That's not to say that the hot money is hot.

As our chart shows in light green, that category's bullish bets in Comex gold futures and options are running very much at the 'Meh' end of historic levels. And net-net, that puts the net speculative position of Managed Money traders barely in line with its 2-decade average.

Inflows to gold-backed ETFs have also picked up, but while that has taken a couple of the smaller exchange-traded funds to new record weights, the giant GLD has recovered only half the tonnage it shed during gold's Iran War sell-off.

Here at BullionVault, in contrast, net demand is currently running at its strongest since June 2025, with our global client-base buying almost $16 million-worth of gold so far this month.

Adding fresh ounces to the vaults, that has taken the total value of our customers' gold holdings – all securely stored and insured in each client's choice of London, New York, Singapore, Toronto or most popular Zurich in Switzerland – back up to $6.5 billion, the highest since February's all-time month-end record.

This, to be honest, is a surprise. Net-net, our global clientbase is typically cautious and smart, banking quick gains when prices jump and waiting to buy the dips instead. Yet rather than fading this surge or taking profit, private investors using the world's No.1 marketplace are buying into gold's dramatic price rise right now.

Maybe that's because, with the economic impact of the Iran war now just another part of the furniture for financial markets, gold's long-term drivers have come front and centre again.

I mean, the West's huge government debts, not least in the US, Japan, UK and France, look ever-more unsustainable. Gold in contrast remains the ultimate hard asset, prized and trusted worldwide and throughout human history as the ultimate store of value, a physical asset which cannot be created at will nor defaulted on.

Either way, the gold market has again been telling investors and traders that they simply aren't bullish enough.

Gold outran professional and private investor forecasts last year. Now gold is making a monthly jump for the record books − and the price has already matched the forecast for end-2026 which BullionVault users projected only in June.

Responding to BullionVault's mid-year survey, our global client base forecast on average that the price of gold would rise some 14% over the 6 months to Christmas...

...the most bullish second-half prediction in our survey's 10-year history.

But the precious metal has already matched that forecast, rebounding to touch $4665 per troy ounce and more earlier this week.

No, that doesn't mean gold is going to keep rising, nor that it will now hold these levels or beat your forecast at New Year. And of course, pundits and analysts are now racing to revise their forecasts higher, having only just slashed them from New Year 2026's rush to hike them to $6000 and above.

But that over-excitement was crushed in March by the jump in bond yields and interest rate expectations caused by the Iran War driving oil prices above $100 per barrel.

Yet while long-term interest rates in the bond market have only continued to rise...

...hitting multi-decade highs last seen before the global financial crisis really got going...

...gold prices have jumped like hardly ever before.

Rates up, gold up? Investors really are starting to doubt government debt.