Investing Forecast: Gold $3679, Silver Price $41 at End-2025
Tuesday, 7/29/2025 20:30
Bullish bullion bias less biased among actual investors...
So the RESULTS are in, says Adrian Ash at BullionVault...
...and investors who own precious metals are bullish on precious metals!
No surprise? You might think looking at the headline numbers from BullionVault's latest user survey.
Silver will end 2025 above $41 per ounce, and gold will finish the year at $3679. Or so says the average forecast from gold and silver fans.
But their bias isn't biased enough in 2025. Not according to the market (nor according to some
AI precious metals price forecasts either).
Because the price of precious metals keeps proving more bullish than even the bullion owners who use BullionVault.
Take platinum and palladium, for instance.
When we asked for our customers' outlook at the start of this month, the platinum-group metals were trading around $1330 and $1100 respectively.
From there, the average forecast in BullionVault's latest survey predicted a year-end level of $1430 for
the platinum price and $1145 for palladium...
...a bullish but not dramatic outlook for the least owned and smallest bullion markets.
Yet the PGMs have already reached and blown past those forecasts...
...hitting fresh multi-year highs in terms of all currencies and sparking
a scramble to grab metal among industrial PGM users and consumers in the wholesale market.
No, that doesn't mean platinum and palladium prices will end the year at these new, higher levels. Nor does it mean that BullionVault users have any more or less insight than professional analysts and traders.
But those specialists, having been similarly caught off guard by the PGMs in summer 2025, have also been woefully wide of the mark in gold and silver as well.
Whereas BullionVault users...?
As you can see, the New Year wisdom of BullionVault users called silver pretty much bang on as a crowd in both 2023 and 2024.
This New Year, our respondents then forecast that silver would rise to $36.80 across 2025.
That was a very bullish call, way beyond what market professionals foresaw.
But even that forecast got taken out in June, and it's now almost $2 below where the silver price is trading today.
No surprise, therefore, that BullionVault's mid-year survey...
...in which nearly 2-in-3 respondents said that they currently own silver...
...has revised the average end-2025 forecast up to $41.18 per ounce.
Because bullion bulls are bullish. Right?
Maybe. But some 7.7% of respondents said that they think silver will actually fall between now and New Year 2026, while a further 1-in-5 said they think the price won't move much at all.
Yet across this un-bullish group in total, more than one third said that they do currently own silver!
Which seems weird. Nothing next to the weirdness in gold, though.
BullionVault has been asking its customers about their motives, concerns and price outlook every six months since December 2014.
That makes our survey by far the largest, longest and most consistent of private investors who hold precious metals in their portfolio anywhere that we know of.
This summer's poll, asking about the end-2025 outlook, received more than 1,000 full responses from across BullionVault's global client base.
All responses were, as ever, anonymous and freely given. And more than 9-in-10 respondents said that they currently own gold.
Yet when asked to predict where the price of gold will be trading six months from now, almost 1-in-5 said they foresee 'no change' or even a price drop.
Weird? Maybe. It stands to reason that you would only own an asset you expect to go up in price.
But investing in gold very often starts as an investment 'hedge'...
...hoping for the best but insuring against the worst across all the other assets you own.
So you keep holding the stuff, even though you hope (and maybe believe) that it will stop going up. Maybe because the things driving it higher might take a pause.
And what things are those?
Geopolitics has now topped our poll as the No.1 driver of precious metals prices for 3 surveys running.
In fact, coming in at 32.9% of all responses this month, geopolitics gave its strongest showing since summer 2019.
The size of government debts and deficits comes next, winning 23.6% of all votes with its largest-ever response since we first added it to our list of possible drivers (as suggested by a BullionVault user as it happens) in New Year 2016.
Monetary policy, in contrast, got its lowest share ever. Down at 12.8%, the outlook for interest rates or QE was overtaken by the bullion market's internal demand and supply. That factor saw its strongest reading outside of summer 2024's record 21.5% with a showing of 16.1%, led yet again by demand factors (such as central-bank gold buying) rather than any concerns over mining output or scrap.
Upshot? With geopolitics still driving, the average forecast for gold's Dollar price at the end of this year has now been hiked from $3070 per ounce when we asked you at the start of 2025 up to $3679.
This new forecast was 11.5% above the price of gold when we asked for our users' views around the start of this month. But it's now less than 10.0% above gold's market-clearing price at the end of last week. Because the price has risen again.
But so what?
"Surely customers purely guessing whether the price will go up or down will not provide you any useful information," says one respondent...
...emailing to discuss our survey after taking it and finding themselves "surprised I actually sent the survey back!"
But exactly! It's precisely such self-doubt, that lack of deep conviction, which makes reviewing your thinking worthwhile at least once or twice a year. And why not then pour your guesses, ideas and surprises...
...anonymously, as per our decade-long survey...
...into a pool which we can all then pick over to see how investors as a group believe or guess or simply take a stab at how things might unfold?
In or out of the precious metals market, the views and actions which an investor takes are exactly what go towards making the price, alongside all the other decisions from other investors and traders worldwide.
And however weird you feel about naming a number, you surely feel more certain than some professional analysts.
"Goldman Sachs has a base case price of $3,700 an ounce by year-end and $4,000 by mid-2026," says Investors.com of
the US investment bank's latest gold forecast.
"In the event of a recession, the acceleration in inflows could drive the gold price to $3,880 by year-end...[and] in extreme risk scenarios − such as heightened concerns over Federal Reserve independence or shifts in US reserve policy − Goldman said it is plausible that gold could reach $4,500 by the end of 2025."
Three numbers and a lot of 'maybes'.
Look out for more about our survey on GoldNews over the next couple of days, including summer 2025's big final question:
"Just who do you trust to give you investment advice?"
Funny, but no one replied by saying "Goldman".
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