Gold is having a moment. Is now the time to invest?

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Life Kit – "Gold is having a moment. Is now the time to invest?"

Date: May 28, 2026
Host: Marielle Segarra, NPR
Guest: Maria Aspen (NPR Finance Correspondent)
Expert Interviews: Katie Klingensmith (Edelman Financial Engines), Lee Baker (Claris Financial Advisors)

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Episode Overview

This episode explores whether now is a good time for the average person to invest in gold, given its recent surge in price. Host Marielle Segarra discusses gold’s role as a safe haven investment, the different ways to invest in gold (including physically and through financial instruments), and how gold stacks up against other long-term investments like stocks. The episode emphasizes expert advice on risk, portfolio diversification, and common pitfalls.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Surge in Gold Prices and Why It's Happening

• Gold’s Recent “Moment”

  • Gold prices have surged, recently having their best year since 1979 (Maria Aspen, 00:38).
  • Gold is considered a "safe haven" during economic and geopolitical uncertainty, appealing especially when inflation is high or markets are volatile (00:50).
  • Gold is part of what Aspen calls the "fear trade," escalating during periods of trade wars, energy crises, and actual wars.

  “Gold is often seen as a hedge against all of that.” – Maria Aspen (00:59)

Cultural Attachment & the 'Currency' Angle

• In some cultures, gold’s reliability outweighs local currency; it’s often a traditional gift believed to hold value.

• This dynamic is increasing in the US as people worry about the dollar’s value and global economic stability (03:17).

  “Countries around the world, governments around the world started worrying about the safety and security of the US government and the US system and started rethinking whether they wanted to hold as many of their reserves in US Dollars. ... We saw many central banks sell some dollars and swap to gold.” – Maria Aspen (03:43)

Understanding Gold Pricing and Buying Methods

• The price most referenced is the "spot price" (per ounce of physical gold), but futures also exist (04:53).

• Gold can be purchased in various forms:

  • Physical gold (bars, jewelry, coins)
  • Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) pegged to gold’s value
  • Stocks in gold mining companies

• Each method has tradeoffs around storage, risk, convenience, and potential returns (05:44).

  “There are all of these downsides of buying the physical valuable thing and keeping it somewhere... As a broader investment class... gold doesn't pay dividends or interest...” – Maria Aspen (06:23)

Pros and Cons: Should You Invest in Gold Now?

• Physical gold creates storage and security issues and pays no dividends (06:23–08:00).

• Gold-backed financial instruments (like ETFs) also don’t create regular investment income—profit only comes if the price goes up and you sell at the right time.

• Legendary investor Warren Buffett is skeptical of gold for this reason (06:23).

  “We look to include investments that make returns over time. And when one invests in gold, one is simply hoping that the price of gold goes up.” – Katie Klingensmith (08:20)

• Stocks and bonds, in contrast, create returns through dividends and interest; gold does not (08:00–08:10).

Long-Term Performance: Gold vs. Stocks

• Stocks (e.g., S&P 500 Index) have outperformed gold over the long run:
  • S&P 500: Avg. 10% annual return (past 30 years)
  • Gold: Avg. below 8% annual return (past 30 years) (10:06).
• There are short-term periods when gold outperforms, but historical perspective favors stocks (09:59–10:26).

Is Now a Good Time to Buy Gold?

• Buying gold now, after a price surge, is risky. Many advisors warn against making decisions based on recent performance ("rearview mirror investing").

• Gold can be overhyped, especially following sharp rises, leading investors to overweight it and potentially get burned (10:45–11:32).

  "There tends to be, in my opinion, some overhyping of gold... there tends to be a push where people are... led into what I would say is an overly aggressive allocation..." – Lee Baker (10:59)

Portfolio Recommendations: How Much Gold?

• Advice varies from none (Katie Klingensmith) to as much as 15% (Ray Dalio, considered “super aggressive”).

• “Middle of the road” advice from Lee Baker recommends a maximum of 5% of your portfolio in gold or any single commodity (12:00–13:02).

  • Diversification is key; heavier gold weighting increases risk if prices fall unexpectedly.

  “I start to get a little nervous because something can go wrong and it can go wrong at the wrong time and have an oversized impact on your portfolio.” – Lee Baker (12:48)

Other Precious Metals

• Silver and copper have also seen recent price increases, but are more affordable and have additional industrial uses (13:21–14:31).
  • Their value is connected to real-world demand (solar panels, construction, electronics) unlike gold, which is more sentiment-driven.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Gold’s Emotional Pull:

  “Gold... it’s shiny, yes, it’s solid. It’s something physical that a lot of cultures... have decided has inherent value, but it doesn’t do anything to actually make the price go up. It’s just kind of what external factors are making other investors decide that it’s more expensive.” – Maria Aspen (08:58)

• On FOMO and Momentum:

  “One investor I talked to called it the momentum trade... So retail investors see the price go up and they buy more into gold... until something happens to kind of snap the spell.” – Maria Aspen (08:58)

• On Overhyped Gold Advice:

  "Looking in the rearview mirror to set your priorities and how you want to allocate your assets is a bad thing to do." – Lee Baker (10:59)

• On Diversification:

  “If you’re looking to get into gold, maybe look for a broader precious metals or commodities fund that gives you some exposure but also hedges your risk a little bit.” – Maria Aspen (14:31)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [00:38] – Gold’s price surge and economic backdrop
• [03:17] – Cultural and global currency angles; central banks and “sell America trade”
• [04:45–05:44] – How gold prices work and ways to invest (physical, ETFs, mining stocks)
• [06:23–08:10] – Physical vs. paper gold; income vs. speculative assets
• [09:59–10:26] – Long-term returns: Gold vs. S&P 500
• [10:45–11:32] – Is now a good time to buy? Overhype, risk, and behavioral bias
• [12:00–13:02] – Expert advice on portfolio gold allocation (<5%)
• [13:21–14:31] – Precious metals beyond gold: Silver and copper
• [14:38–end] – Recap and practical summary

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Recap and Final Advice

• Gold’s recent surge is driven by global uncertainty, but its long-run returns generally trail stocks.
• Most investment experts do not recommend a large gold allocation; if you choose to add gold, keep it below 5% of your overall portfolio.
• Consider gold-related ETFs or commodities funds for simplicity. Balance gold with exposure to stocks, bonds, and possibly other industrial precious metals.
• Avoid making investment choices based on FOMO or last year’s performance (“rearview mirror investing”).
• For true portfolio diversification, look at gold as just one small component, not a mainstay.

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If you’re seeking to diversify or just curious about gold’s role in a cloudy economy, this episode offers grounded context and practical tips for navigating the “gold rush” sensibly.

Transcript

[NPR Announcer]

This message comes from Northwestern Mutual. Their financial professionals will build a tailored plan based on your goals. Looking out for blind spots and new opportunities. Get [e-mail] the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

[Marielle Segarra]

You're listening to Life Kit from NPR. Hey, it's Marielle. I lost a gold hoop earring the other day, one of several pieces of jewelry that I have recently disappeared. And my first thought was I clearly cannot be trusted with real gold jewelry because have you seen the price of gold these days?

[Maria Aspen]

Gold has just been on this record breaking tear and now the price has been going up for a few years. But last year was the best year for Gold since 1979.

[Marielle Segarra]

This is Maria Aspen. She's a finance correspondent at NPR and she says gold tends to be seen as a safe haven investment when things are looking scary in the world.

[Maria Aspen]

It's sometimes called part of the fear trade. So in the past year, we've had a trade war. We've had a real war in Iran. We've had an energy crisis where we've seen concerns about inflation still not being under control. And gold is often seen as a hedge against all of that.

[Marielle Segarra]

So maybe you're wondering, should I get in on this if gold is doing so well? And I have heard a lot of ads on YouTube and podcasts suggesting exactly that. On this episode of Life Kit, I talked to Maria about this. We'll go over what it actually means to buy gold. You don't necessarily have to own the physical stuff, whether it's a good long term investment because the price is super volatile and how its returns compare to the stock market over time.

[Lee Baker]

Foreign

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[Marielle Segarra]

shared some of the reasons that people are buying gold right now. I think in a lot of cultures, too, that's just the thing you do. You buy someone gold for their birthday or when they graduate, and it's seen as more reliable than the currency in some countries. So I wonder, is there a currency element in the US as well now where people are like, the dollar's value is dropping, so we're now more bullish on gold.

[Maria Aspen]

Yeah. And actually it's but even the US Its central banks around the world have traditionally held a lot of their reserves in US Dollars. And last year, especially between President Trump slapping a whole bunch of tariffs on almost everything the US Imports, as well as some of his threats to the Federal Reserve's independence, all of that yielded what was known as a sell America trade. In other words, countries around the world, governments around the world started worrying about the safety and security of the US Government and the US System and started rethinking whether they wanted to hold as many of their reserves in US Dollars. And we saw many central banks sell some dollars and swap to gold. So that contributed to driving the price of gold up. And then everyone sees that the price of gold goes up, which makes you and me sit down and be like, oh, gold is really going up. Should I invest in it? Maybe it's a good investment. I don't want to be left behind. Right.

[Marielle Segarra]

When we say gold prices are going up, what are we actually looking at? Is this the price of an ounce of physical gold?

[Maria Aspen]

Yes, it's the price of an ounce of physical gold. But there are a couple of different prices. There's the spot price, which is what it is to buy gold on the spot, meaning right now. Or there are gold futures, which is like any other future, a contract that an investor enters into to buy gold when it hits a certain price. Now, spot gold can often influence the price of futures, and they tend to be connected. Sometimes there's a big difference, but often not. Gold jewelry has long been a way of buying gold, a way of, like, storing value and giving people gifts or making sure that your loved ones has something that has an inherent worth in and of itself. Right. We could go to Costco today and buy some gold.

[Marielle Segarra]

So when we're buying gold, it could be literal gold bars, but there are also lots of other ways to buy gold.

[Maria Aspen]

Yes, and frankly, when we're talking about should you buy gold as part of your broader investment portfolio, we're probably talking about some of the less literal types of gold. So you could buy into their exchange traded funds or ETFs that are pegged to the price of gold. You could also buy into companies or funds backed by the stock of companies that are like in the gold industry. So like mining companies, I mean literally the companies selling the modern day equivalent of picks and shovels.

[Marielle Segarra]

Why would you choose one of these options over another if you were going to buy gold?

[Maria Aspen]

So jokes about Costco aside, there are things you have to think about with each type of investing in gold that you're considering. And let's say investing in precious metals more generally. If you're buying the physical stuff you, you have to think about where are you going to store it? Do you have enough space? Is it secure? Are you worried about like home invasions or robberies or do you have insurance? There are all of these downsides of buying the physical valuable thing and keeping it somewhere where you have to spend time, money, or find space to store it as a broader investment class. If you're buying anything that's like not a mining company but pegged to the price of gold, like a gold backed etf. And gold doesn't pay dividends or interest in the same way that stocks or bonds do. So you're buying something or you're buying a fund pegged to something and you basically have to hold it until the price goes up and you sell it at the right time and reap the profit. And this is something that has made like Warren Buffett, the legendary investor, say, yeah, gold isn't really worth it because you could buy a lot of other types of investments like company stocks or even land. They will generate actual income and revenue and pay dividends. If you're buying a share of a company, you are in theory like watching that company make more money and grow in value over time and you're benefiting from that gold. It's more about holding onto it and waiting to time your sale of it correctly.

[Marielle Segarra]

Whereas you'd get interest if you invest in bonds and you get dividends if you invest in stocks with gold. You wouldn't get either of those.

[Maria Aspen]

Right? So I talked about this with Katie Klingensmith. She's the chief investment strategist for the Financial Advisor Edelman Financial Engines we look

[Marielle Segarra]

to include investments that make returns over time. And when one invests in gold, one is simply hoping that the price of gold goes up. When one invests in a company, one is hoping that that company grows over time, that it actually is producing things, making earnings, reinvesting in the company.

[Maria Aspen]

So she doesn't automatically include gold or other precious metals in the investment portfolios that she creates for her clients.

[Marielle Segarra]

Okay, so it sounds like the point here is that when you buy stock in a company, that stock price is supposed to go up and down based on the company's fundamentals, like its product, its profits, its potential.

[Maria Aspen]

Yes. Whereas as we've seen with the super volatile price of gold in the past year, and frankly, the volatile price of gold over time, yes, it's shiny, yes, it's solid. It's something physical that a lot of cultures, you know, have decided has inherent value, but it doesn't do anything to actually make the price go up. It's just kind of what external factors are making other investors decide that it's more expensive. And as we've seen in the past year, there's kind of an element of like FOMO right now, you know, the price of gold has been going up. So should I buy gold? Because I don't want to miss out on this investment that's going up and up. One investor I talked to called it the momentum trade. And you know, that comes back to central banks are buying more into gold. So retail investors see the price go up and they buy more into gold. And that's all great until something happens to kind of snap the spell, and we're all like, oh, wait, maybe we are overexposed to gold right now.

[Marielle Segarra]

How does gold compare as an investment over time to, say, investing in AN S&P 500 Index Fund?

[Maria Aspen]

Over the long haul, the stock market outperforms gold. You know, there have been years when gold has outperformed the stock market. But over, like the last 30, the S&P 500 has returned about 10% and gold has returned less than that. Over the last 30 years or so, gold has returned more along the lines of 8%.

[Marielle Segarra]

Okay. It seems like, particularly in this moment, it would have been a great time to buy gold a year ago, with the benefit of hindsight, of course. But now that the price is so high, as you mentioned, if you did want to buy gold, would now really be the time?

[Maria Aspen]

Personally, I'm not sure it would be. But, you know, I'm not a certified financial planner, but I've talked about it with certified financial planners like Lee Baker. He is the founder and CEO of Claris Financial Advisors in Atlanta.

[Lee Baker]

There tends to be, in my opinion, some overhyping of gold in that. Now it's sort of like, hey, gold doubles, triples, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And there tends to be a push where people are cajoled, coerced, led into what I would say is an overly aggressive allocation to go because it's doing well. We know that looking in the rearview mirror to set your priorities and how you want to allocate your assets is a bad thing to do.

[Maria Aspen]

I think that's just so important for any kind of investment. Like, don't buy into something just because you're looking into the rearview mirror. And it's done really well in the past.

[Marielle Segarra]

If you did decide that you wanted to have some gold in your portfolio just to just to try it out, just because you think the price is going to continue to go up, what percentage of your investments might a financial advisor suggest that you shift from stocks or bonds to gold?

[Maria Aspen]

So I will start by telling you that the advice out there is all over the place. The hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio, who founded Bridgewater Associates, he's out there saying you should put as much as 15% of your portfolio in gold. Now, that is super aggressive compared to what most other advice is. Some of the financial advisors I've talked to, like Katie, they say maybe none. You know, they do not automatically include any gold in the portfolios that they create for clients. And then Lee, he's kind of middle of the road, as you heard. He thinks that gold is pretty overhyped these days. But he has advised clients to buy into commodities as part of a more diversified portfolio. And this is his general advice at 5%.

[Lee Baker]

I start to get a little nervous because something can go wrong and it can go wrong at the wrong time and have an oversized impact on your portfolio.

[Marielle Segarra]

So less than 5%.

[Maria Aspen]

His advice is less than 5%. And I should point out that's again, his general advice for investing in any one thing, whether it's gold, whether it's one particular stock. So his advice is 5% is starting to be too much.

[Marielle Segarra]

What about precious metals in general? Like, if you're trying to diversify your portfolio, I wonder, does it also make sense to invest in silver or copper?

[Maria Aspen]

Yeah, I mean, and we've seen sort of silver and copper kind of mimic what's going on with gold. So silver and copper have hit record highs also, but they're so much less expensive. Silver is trading at $80 per ounce versus $4,500 per ounce for gold. That said, there are some more use cases for silver and copper in more industrial purposes than we see for gold. Gold can be used in some electronics and obviously it's used for jewelry. But with silver and copper, they're used in construction and computer chips and solar panels. So there's like real world demand and applications for them beyond what there is for gold. Again, most of the financial advisors I talk to say if you're looking to get into gold, maybe look for a broader precious metals or commodities fund that gives you some exposure but also hedges your risk a little bit.

[Marielle Segarra]

Maria Aspen, thank you so much.

[Maria Aspen]

Thank you so much. Pleasure to join you.

[Marielle Segarra]

All right, time for a recap. The price of gold has skyrocketed over the past year, so last year would have been a great time to buy, but now not necessarily looking in the rearview mirror to make investment choices is not the best strategy. Also, over the long term, The S&P 500 outperforms gold. But if you'd like to add some to your portfolio to diversify a bit and maybe take advantage of any further price increases, Maria's source said to aim for less than 5%. You can buy gold by the bar. You can invest in gold futures, though that's generally something only professional investors do. You can also invest in a fund that tracks the price of gold. And you can invest in companies that are involved in the gold economy, like gold miners or retailers. Also, if you want to diversify in general, maybe consider other precious metals in addition to gold, like silver and copper. The thing about those is they are also used in industry, so their value is pegged in part to their usefulness, as opposed to gold, which runs largely on vibes. All right, that's our show. A reminder, by the way, you can sign up for Life Kit plus to support our work at NPR and get curated playlists on popular Life Kit topics. Start Listening today at plus.NPR.org LifeKit this episode of Life Kit was produced by Margaret Serino. Our digital editor is Malika Garib, and our visuals editor is CJ Ricohen. Megan Cain is our senior supervising editor and Beth Donovan is our executive producer. Our production team also includes Andy Tagle, Claire Marie Schneider, and Sylvie Douglas. Engineering support comes from Nisha Hyness, with fact checking by Tyler Jones. I'm Marielle Segarra. Thanks for listening.

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