"Gold is money. Everything else is credit." - JP Morgan

Friends,
💰 Gold is trading over $3,000/oz — Hooray! 🎉
It’s a big milestone that I believe is worthy of a bit of thought about how far the market has come. There’s a lot to worry about in 2025 😬, but it would seem a shame to let the moment go completely unsung 🎺.

That being the case, I’ve put together some price charts, price ratio charts, and frequency histograms 📊 with the historic prices of these metals going back 30 years. The LBMA data I used also had gold and silver going back 50 years, so I’ve included that too ⏳.

Being an investor in the precious metals market invariably exposes you to many themes — often colourful 🎨 — that play out across geography, technology, politics, and the monetary system itself 🌏⚙️🏛️💸.

I first became exposed to the market in the early 2000s when friends were investing in silver 🪙. Learning about their investment theses and trying to understand the price swings over the next 20 years has taken me deep into the forces shaping these markets.

This is a colourful market that will introduce you to bullion banks, Indian weddings, accusations of market manipulation, doomsdayers, electric vehicles, fuel cells, government nationalisations — and that’s just the start! 🚀

But at the end of the day, as finance professionals, we know:
📉 Price is the sum of all themes.
The charts and histograms I’ve put together are devoid of theme — they speak only to price. I’ve paid special attention to the relative value of one metal to another ⚖️.

The output of this data has been eye-opening to me — a student of the market for 20 years 👨‍🏫. What’s remarkable is the extreme range these metals trade in relative to one another… and the long periods where some metals do almost nothing or remain stubbornly cheap 💤.

📅 50 — even 30 — years is longer than most of us get to invest. But what I’ve learned is that while these metals might move together in the short term, each one is running its own race in the long term. 🏁.