Gold Could Hit $5,000, Strategist Says. Why Others Are Worried About a Crash.

Investors normally don’t talk about the risks of a bubble forming in the asset that they’re buying to hedge against a different bubble, but gold’s extraordinary surge is starting to trigger uncomfortable conversations about the yellow metal’s bullish prospects.

Gold prices have gained more than 55% this year, blowing past the $3,000 an ounce mark in early spring and topping the $4,000 threshold for the first time on record last month. Gold was up another 3.3% to $4,108.60 in Monday trading, a new record high.

Myriad reasons have been cited for the surge, including the slumping U.S. dollar, soaring tech stocks that have concentrated broader market risks into a handful of megacap tech names, purchases by central banks seeking to diversify away from the dollar, and renewed inflation risks tied to ongoing tariff and trade disputes.

Central bank buying has also been significant, with China alone adding 39.2 tons to its overall holdings since it returned to the market in November of last year.

“Central banks’ appetite for gold is driven by concerns from countries about Russian-style sanctions on their foreign assets in the wake of decisions made by the U.S. and Europe to freeze Russian assets, as well as shifting strategies on currency reserves,” said ING commodities strategist Ewa Manthey.

“The pace of buying by central banks doubled following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.”

Gold-backed ETFs , meanwhile, are attracting billions in new investments, with overall additions likely to have topped 100 tons over the three months ending in September. That’s more than triple the quarterly average over the past eight years.

The combination of forces is likely to drive more gains for gold in the months ahead, according to Société Générale’s commodity research team, headed by Mike Haigh.

“Gold’s ascent to $5000 seems increasingly inevitable,” Haigh wrote in a note published Monday, citing both strong ETF flows and renewed central bank purchases.

Haigh also notes that ETF flows are tracking a rise in SocGen’s U.S. uncertainty index, which is now pegged at more than three times the level it reached over the five months before last year’s presidential election win for President Donald Trump.

“We cannot imagine a situation where we return to pre-Trump index uncertainty normalcy over our forecast horizon, so ETF flows are a key component to our price forecasting,” Haigh said. His $500o price target is pegged for the end of 2026.

Lisa Shalett, chief investment officer at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, has a different take, tied in part to what she sees as a way for governments to “challenge the dollar’s stranglehold on global money movements.”

Gold holdings, Shalett argues, can “improve collateralisation of their fiat currencies and/or cryptocurrencies in a world where currency markets undefined may be remade by digital assets, cryptocurrencies, and stablecoins.”

The gold market’s mimicry of previous historic booms, however, has caught the attention of Bank of America analyst Paul Ciana, who cautioned in a note published last week that “prices have tended to pivot near round-number levels.”

Citing data showing “midway corrections” in long term bull markets for gold, Ciana sees the chances for a near-term pullback that “rhymes” with pullbacks of around 40% in the mid-1970s and 25% following the global financial crisis in 2008.

“This boom is about 10 years old, smaller in size than the 1970s and 2000s boom but nearly as old,” Ciana wrote. “This warrants caution into round number resistance at $4,000, or again later at $5,000.”

Gold isn’t likely a bubble. It’s hard for central banks to sell, and many of the countries encouraging its import, like China and India, also make it difficult for investors to move offshore.

But gold did lose around 60% of its value in the two decades that followed its 1970s boom, with bear markets following in 2008 and 2015.

This year’s really is still going strong, of course, but with gold’s advance tied to nearly all of the concerns currently gripping financial markets, maybe it’s worth asking if it’s being “all things to all people” is the best kind of hedge—or just another risky bet on rising prices.

Gold is one of the market’s go-to hedges in rocky times. Don’t forget that gold miners’ stocks are too.

The stock market’s gains in 2026 belie the rocky macroeconomic picture: elevated inflation, heightened geopolitical tensions, and jitters about the artificial-intelligence trade. That backdrop, in theory, should be the time for gold to shine. Instead, the price of the yellow metal has tumbled more than 5% so far, after last year’s blistering 65% rally. In part, the U.S. dollar’s recovery has stymied gold, which benefited from the greenback’s weakness in 2025.

Even with the precious metal’s recent weakness, gold mining stocks could be the best way to profit from this year’s uncertainty.

Gold miners “are a valuable hedge against macro risks that would likely be damaging for equities,” BCA Research’s Noah Weisberger and Rishabh Shah wrote this week.

Concerns about the Federal Reserve’s next moves to tackle inflation, the increasingly crowded AI trade, and steep valuations for tech stocks are just some of the drivers that could help gold’s price get on even footing— and lead to even bigger gains for miner stocks.

These stocks’ prices tend to outpace gold’s moves, because the companies have fixed operational costs. So when gold’s price rallies, their profit margins soar, and vice versa. For instance, the VanEck Gold Miners GDX +7.39% exchange-traded fund has fallen 11% this year as the metal has slumped.

Now, gold’s price just needs to stabilize to help miners’ stocks take off, and that seems to be happening. The precious metal has recently found support above the $4,000 level, and has stuck in a narrow range since the end of June. But its price rose ever so slightly in July, ending a four-month losing streak for the metal. Technical analysis also suggests that gold is due for a comeback.

Barron’s recently wrote that the pullbacks for both gold miners and the metal itself are overdone. Senior technical analyst Doug Busch noted that the VanEck ETF is on the “verge of a breakout” and has the potential to hit $11o in early 2027, up more than 40% from its current price.

Gold miners also have more than their role as a market hedge going for them. Their fundamentals are solid, too, says Chris Mancini, portfolio co-manager of the Gabelli Gold Fund.

“Precious metals miners are generating substantial amounts of free cash flow given profit margins of over $2,000 per ounce, and are returning this cash to shareholders through buybacks and dividends,” he said in an email.

“Buying the miners is a cheap way to get exposure to the price of gold,” he added. His fund owns Newmont NEM +6.71%, a Barron’s stock pick last year, and Agnico Eagle Mines as top holdings, as well as miners Northern Star Resources, Endeavour Mining, and Kinross Gold K+8.59%.

Miners are better businesses than they used to be, the BCA team added.

“Capex is more disciplined, margins are high and rising…and they are largely independent of the AI story,” Weisberger, BCA’s head of equities, and Shah, a senior analyst, wrote.

That last part is key. AI is disrupting the software industry and many other services and information-oriented businesses, and investors have piled into AI stocks. But ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and other large-language models aren’t going to replace the need to mine for metals.

“Equity portfolios can benefit from exposure to quality that is uncorrelated to AI risk, and gold miners fit the bill,” the BCA team said.

They recommend that investors buy the VanEck Gold Miners ETF, which owns top miners such as Agnico, Barrick Mining ABX +7.24%, and Newmont.

An important bonus for big gold miners’ stocks is that their valuations are attractive after the gold’s pullback, too. The VanEck ETF is now trading at just a little more than nine times next year’s earnings estimates. That’s a big discount to its five-year average price-to-earnings ratio of 14, according to FactSet.

What’s more, the ETF is currently valued at a more than 50% discount to the S&P 500 SPX -0.17%, which is trading for about 19 times earnings estimates for 2027. Mining stocks have typically traded at just a 25% discount to the broader market over the past five years. So there is significant upside for the group if valuations move back toward normal levels.

One factor that complicates mining stocks as a market hedge, of course, is if stocks bounce back, which has been the case so far in August.

But both the market and economic outlooks remain cloudy, and investors remain nervous about the Fed’s next moves and AI stocks. Gold miners should do just fine, even if the anxious mood on Wall Street persists.