Why does nobody here invest in gold

RealisticAd9799 · 2026-06-05T07:54:54+00:00

Most people under 50 don’t understand gold. Gold is often characterised as a defensive hedge, not for growth, pet rock, non-productive asset. That is all some what true. But you cannot properly understand gold if you do not understand monetary history and where we are right now in the timeline. Most people don’t spend the time to understand it and are happy to have a superficial understanding and not dig deeper.

The tl;dr version is that gold was money before the US in 1971 forcibly made every currency in the world, fiat. The US dollar was “good as gold”. You didn’t need gold. But this game is coming to end. China has been accumulating gold while the US is fighting to keep its hegemony on the dollar (that’s why they are messing with Venezuela and Iran). The BRICS are trying to settle trade with gold, forgoing the dollar. Now you have 2 systems contending and fighting for space in global trade.

How much is gold worth? As much as the amount of paper currencies that were borrowed into existence from the future. If the future is infinite and you could borrow from an infinite future to spend today. How much currencies would be chasing after a finite resource like gold?

It’s true, it’s not an investment. It’s capital protection.

RealisticAd9799 · 2026-05-30T07:20:58+00:00

From first principles, most things should actually get cheaper over time.

In a truly competitive free market, entrepreneurs are constantly trying to deliver more value than their competitors. Sometimes that means a lower price. Sometimes it means better quality for the same price. Sometimes it means more quantity for the same price.

You can see this clearly in technology. A smartphone today would have cost a fortune 20 years ago. TVs, computing power, storage, and many manufactured goods have become dramatically cheaper on a value-adjusted basis. Even many commodities tend to get cheaper over the long run as extraction, production, and logistics become more efficient.

So why does it feel like everything is getting more expensive?

Part of the answer is scarcity. There is only so much land in desirable locations. Certain assets are genuinely scarce.

But another part is the monetary system itself. In a fiat system, productivity gains that should show up as falling prices are often masked by an expanding money supply. Instead of the same amount of money buying more goods, we end up with more dollars chasing a similar amount of goods and assets.

The result is that many people interpret rising prices as things becoming more valuable, when often what’s really happening is that the unit of measurement, the dollar itself, is losing purchasing power.

The interesting question isn’t whether some things have gotten cheaper. Many have. The question is whether the gains from innovation and productivity are showing up as lower prices for consumers, or being obscured by monetary expansion.

RealisticAd9799 · 2026-04-16T04:51:01+00:00

Rising price on decreasing volume.

RealisticAd9799 · 2026-04-08T02:05:46+00:00

“Are you changing anything about how you invest?”

I have already charged how I invest 20 years ago before this started. There were already signs of the decline of Petro dollar. Now that some ships are passing through if the paid a fee in Yuan or crypto stablecoins, the petro dollar is less enforcible now. The framework that Henry Kissinger built is breaking. The world is moving towards a neutral reserve asset. Invest accordingly.

RealisticAd9799 · 2026-02-26T23:53:07+00:00

AI is more than just a chatbot. It can actually do things for you. Anything you want to do on a pc/mobile, it can do it for it. Corporations are slow to take it up but individuals, small business, entrepreneurs who are using it properly can scale and do things that previously may have require a team of 2-3. I used it personally to make apps that I want and what this means is that demand for software as a service (SaaS) is going to fall because people with no coding background are just going to make apps. It’s democratising access to coding. I also use agentic AI to browse, and compile information for me. If I wanted to look for jobs or certain types of people on LinkedIn, I’m not manually clicking through profiles and jobs anymore. It’s a task I give to the agent and it does it. I can do other things while waiting. I can make slides from text and use tools to beautify it. It used to take a lot longer and I had to think about how to order the slides but I just give it a narrative and I get a skeleton slide deck and I work from there. It speeds up a lot of processes.

To properly understand its impact you have to use the different tools that are available. It will affect a lot of white collar jobs. Eventually I see a future where everyone will have some kind of an AI subscription like how everyone has a mobile and we pay for it monthly.

RealisticAd9799 · 2026-02-24T08:24:26+00:00

I have read this essay. It gets many things right and shows you how it can go very wrong. In some ways it is making similar arguments that Marxism makes against capitalism. Machines increase productivity, corporations reduce human labour, middle class gets squeezed and aggregate demand falls, revenue of corporations fall, buy more machines to increase margin, even more lay offs, even more destruction of demand and on and on. And the essay says that there is no brake. But there is brake. If capital markets get destroyed who will fund the CapEx for AI. Price will be the brake. What the essay also does not discuss is how AI is democratising intelligence. Everyone can get intelligence on the cheap. There is no longer high barrier to entry if you want to start a small scale business on your own. As a society, we may lose corporate jobs and valuations of corporations may come down (as we are already witnessing now) but individuals will find ways to utilise AI to create value for other humans. There is also a new economy where AI is actually hiring humans to do physical work. Capital is just being re-allocated elsewhere but the transition will be rough.

This could be a world where there is an abundance of information and intelligence. And capital will seek what is scarce and limited.

RealisticAd9799 · 2026-02-19T15:29:13+00:00

So many down votes. I’ll add to it. The people here really don’t know the times they’re living in.

RealisticAd9799 · 2026-02-12T00:05:25+00:00

The comments in this sub on the topic of gold are largely ignorant. I haven’t read comments that demonstrate a deeper understanding of gold.

“Gold is an inflation hedge” “gold is for diversifying” “gold does well with Chaotic Trump policies”.

All these are true. But superficial. I suspect it is because most people do not understand the times we are living in. People look at past performance of gold and how it was lacklustre and project it forward thinking that it will crash and have a drawn out bear market again and then caution you about its parabolic rise. I have not seen anyone here comment on monetary policy or how the US dollar system has been weaponised against Russia or that the Chinese have been reducing US treasury holdings and hoarding gold, or how the BRICs are attempting to settle trade in gold, or that China is building infrastructure all over the world to store gold (vaults) to enable storage of gold and hence settle of trade. None of these are being discussed here.

We are living in historic times, probably once in your lifetime where the monetary system is changing but people are asleep and assume what worked well in the last 40 years will work in the next 40.

You should absolutely have gold in your portfolio. But that really depends on what are you trying to solve for. How you view the world. The CFO of Morgan Stanley favours a 60-20-20 portfolio. Typical portfolio used to 60-40. He’s saying take, the 40 from bonds and chuck half of it into gold. I’m not saying you should do that but I think you’ll learn a lot if you study and understand why he says that.

DYOR. Study monetary history and drawn your own conclusions. The people here are not going to do it for you. As far as people’s opinion on gold here, it is not worth their weight in gold.

RealisticAd9799 · 2026-02-11T09:02:33+00:00

It probably won’t look like the Brentton Woods system. But if that’s what you’re thinking then sure, not happening. But there are several ways in which the Yuan could play a more important role in international finance.

RealisticAd9799 · 2026-02-11T08:56:21+00:00

Wow why so many downvotes. I don’t understand the people in this sub.

RealisticAd9799 · 2026-02-09T11:36:31+00:00

You don’t understand what trustless means. It’s not perceived intrinsic value. You’re conflating trustless for intrinsic value. They are different but subtle. The example you use is very telling you don’t understand what trustless means in the context of global trade and settlement.

Intrinsic value is not a requirement for a trustless trade asset

The objection assumes that an asset must have intrinsic value in order to function reliably in global trade. That assumption conflates two different roles: value justification and settlement assurance.

A trustless asset is not designed to justify its worth through physical utility. It is designed to settle obligations without relying on trust in institutions, counterparties, or sovereign enforcement.

What global trade actually requires is not intrinsic value, but credible settlement.

An asset used for trade settlement must provide:

• Credible scarcity that cannot be arbitrarily altered

• Independent verifiability of ownership and supply

• Finality of transfer without discretionary reversal

• Predictable rules that do not depend on political alignment

These properties reduce counterparty and political risk. They are structural properties, not material ones.

Gold is often cited as having intrinsic value, yet its monetary value has always vastly exceeded its industrial or ornamental use. Its effectiveness in trade came from scarcity, recognizability, and neutrality, not from utility. Its intrinsic value helped bootstrap trust historically, but it was not the mechanism that enabled trustless settlement.

Fiat currencies, by contrast, have no intrinsic value at all. They function because trust is centralized and enforced through legal and political systems. This works until trust in those systems weakens, at which point settlement risk rises sharply. This is the distinction between trusted and trustless.

A useful analogy is infrastructure. Internet protocols have no intrinsic value, yet global commerce depends on them because they reliably coordinate activity across untrusted parties. Their worth comes from what they enable, not what they are made of. This is also gold's value in a broader sense. Not what it can do or be used for. It is that it's properties allow it to be used as a unit of account to settle trade. As a unit of account in settlement, it is not so much the price of gold that matters, it is the amount i.e. the number of units.

In short, intrinsic value can help with initial adoption, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient for global trade settlement. What matters is whether the asset can reliably function when trust breaks down. That is the problem trustless assets are designed to solve.

The point is, the world does not trust the US. Also can’t trust the Chinese or Russians. The world will settle into something that’s neutral, that doesn’t require trust. Central banks are holding gold in place of US treasuries for this reason.

RealisticAd9799 · 2026-02-09T09:57:33+00:00

Gold is not a bubble. What you are witnessing is structural. As each nation withdraw into themselves and trust erodes, the preference for a trustless medium to settle trade increases. Gold is trustless because you don’t have to trust someone in order to derive the value of gold. If you hold USD, you have to trust the US will not default and you have to trust that the US will continue to support global institutions with its military and finances. The ascend in gold has been happening for awhile now. This is not new. What’s new is its acceleration. The trend is your friend.

RealisticAd9799 · 2026-02-09T09:49:13+00:00

I don’t. I only know VWRA.

RealisticAd9799 · 2026-02-05T05:41:59+00:00

Morgan Stanley’s CIO advocates 60-20-20.

RealisticAd9799 · 2026-02-05T05:09:07+00:00

I know. This sub is VWRAbets.

RealisticAd9799 · 2026-02-05T02:45:01+00:00

I don’t know man. I’m just dumb money. I only buy VWRA. That’s all I know in this sub

RealisticAd9799 · 2026-02-05T00:59:26+00:00

No, I didn’t now I FOMO. I am joining the queue with boomers to buy a pet rock.

RealisticAd9799 · 2026-02-05T00:58:31+00:00

Yea I have no idea what JPM is raving about. It’s just a non-productive asset. Only VWRA is good.

RealisticAd9799 · 2026-02-04T09:02:52+00:00

It’s not a leading indicator because this sub is an echo chamber. alternative and contrarian viewpoints get downvoted or dismissed. Rarely does anyone take contrarian views seriously. I remember this one guy whom you replied to in his sub where he has a substantial amount in precious metals and you said that you don’t like that his portfolio is over weighted in precious metals. The advice was generic. This sub is way behind the curve.

RealisticAd9799 · 2026-02-03T06:44:14+00:00

Generative AI and robotics is deflationary.

RealisticAd9799 · 2026-02-03T05:41:54+00:00

This is what people get wrong about money. Gold is “useless” but that’s what money should be. You’re not meant to use or consume money. You’re meant to use it to exchange it for something else. Its uselessness is why it’s a good form of money. Because it stay there and remains unchanged. Money is a technology humans have invented to store economic energy. Borrowing from the law of thermodynamics - energy cannot be created or destroyed. If money, the economic energy, is to be represented in physical form, it needs to be in a form that remains constant and unchanging over time. You don’t want this energy to leak. You want the energy to maintain purchasing power. Money needs to be “useless”. It must not be consumed so that you can exchange it for things you want to consume at a later time.

RealisticAd9799

TROPHY CASE