Price Forecasts: Investors Never So Bullish on Gold and Silver

Latest survey forecasts near-14% gold gain by New Year 2027...

With GOLD and SILVER rallying from their lowest prices in 8 months this week, private investors who include precious metals in their portfolio have never been so bullish, writes Adrian Ash at BullionVault.

That's the latest finding from BullionVault's twice-annual survey.

Now run every 6 months since the end of 2014, our survey of precious metals investors polled over 950 full responses this month. On average, respondents expect gold to rise significantly by New Year 2027, predicting a gain of 13.8% from the price of $4100 averaged during the period that our mid-2026 survey was out in the field.

That's the strongest mid-year forecast in our survey's near-12-year history. It would put gold back up at $4665 per troy ounce...

...albeit still shy of the New Year's near-$5600 gold price peak and also below last December's average 2026 forecast from our survey of $5136, the most bullish ever full-year prediction among all of our polls so far.

Silver also looked very bullish at the start of this year, and it's looking bullish again according to our respondents.

Their average forecast sees the more industrially-useful monetary metal rising by 16.7% by New Year − also the strongest ever mid-year prediction − giving silver a price of $69.60 per ounce.

Most remarkable however, is the split within those forecasts. Because for both gold and silver, almost 1-in-5 respondents to BullionVault's latest survey is in fact bearish.

Who are these bears?

We don't know. Our survey was, as always, sent only to BullionVault users, but each respondent is entirely anonymous. Nor does our survey ever ask about age, gender, work, income, location, political leanings, faith, eye colour or marital status.

But our survey does ask how much of your self-investable wealth is currently tied up in precious metals. And unsurprisingly, the less bullion you own, the less bullish you are.

Excluding their primary residence, this summer's bears say they typically hold 16.5% of their overall wealth in precious metals. While that's only a little behind those forecasting flat prices at 18.0%, it's well below those who are bullish at 27.0%.

But check those statistics again. Because private investors who now carry 1/6th of their investable wealth in precious metals say that they actually think prices will fall between now and New Year 2027.

That might sound crazy. Or it might sound like those investors perhaps view precious metals as a hedge...

...a kind of insurance or at least diversification for the near-85% of their wealth which isn't in gold, silver, platinum or palladium.

Up or down, what will drive prices higher or lower from here?

More than a quarter of precious metals investors (27.7%) said they think monetary policy will be the single biggest driver of precious metals prices during the second half of 2026. That is comfortably ahead of geopolitics (21.9%), government debt (14.7%) and physical supply and demand (14.0%).

Inflation, traditionally viewed as one of gold's key price drivers, ranked much lower, with just 6.3% of investors believing it will have the biggest impact on prices to the start of 2027.

That accords with inflation's poor showing across all of BullionVault's surveys to date. Monetary policy has repeatedly vied with geopolitics as the single largest driver named by our respondents, returning to the top spot this summer to beat geopolitics for the first time since New Year 2024, back before Trump's re-election campaign began in earnest.

Overall, monetary policy has now been named the key price driver of precious metals in 13 out of 24 of our polls to date, beating geopolitics with a total of ten. Inflation has only made No.1 once (and it's the only other category ever to take top spot), achieved in our New Year 2022 survey...

...back when inflation in the US consumer-price index was soaring at the fastest pace since the early 1980s as inflation across the Eurozone and in the UK was on its way to topping double-digits.

Here in July 2026 of course, both gold and silver are trading far below their all-time highs of six and seven months ago. More than 25% and 50% lower respectively, in fact.

So our latest survey also asked private investors who currently own precious metals what they believe drove those falls?

The largest single response to our survey says that the No.1 reason prices have sunk is simply that investors took profit and reallocated their capital to other asset classes.

Behind that comes this year's about-turn in expectations for interest rates (more on that in a moment), followed by weaker demand among consumers and also from central banks...

...followed by a blunt "Boom therefore bust" verdict from nearly 1-in-10 replies.

Add it together, in fact, and as we highlight in yellow on our table, very nearly 1-in-2 investors who own precious metals believes that the major cause of the price drop was actually the New Year's record-high levels...

...inviting investors to take profit (or get out as the "mania" peaked) while crushing fundamental support from consumers as central banks reduced or even reversed some of their recent historic demand.

In sum, high prices proved to be the cure for gold and silver's record high prices. But those prices now look too low, and as monetary policy rather than geopolitics now drives the market to New Year 2027, prices will rise sharply higher from here.

Or so private investors who include precious metals in their portfolios forecast in the aggregate.