Anyone who has proposed marriage with a gold ring in the past two years has certainly experienced sticker shock at the rapidly rising price of what has historically been a stable asset. While the question of what drove this pricing has been heavily scrutinized, we have analyzed how each sector of this industry—from public to private mining to futures trading—has reacted to these changes.
As such, we charted several factors to identify how each responded to changes in the macro regime, and all have been converted into percent differences to better show the scale of changes. We selected RING to represent gold mining, XME to represent broad market mining, gold futures for the underlying commodity interest, and a custom basket of private mining funds to discern whether the longer investment horizon had any effect.
Key Takeaways
Using the price of gold futures for reference, we discovered that it had a fairly stable value from 2012-2023 and stayed within 30% of its benchmark 2012 value. Furthermore, the gold mining and futures prices seemed to move in lockstep. While broad mining clearly correlates with those two factors, it was influenced from the price of its other component materials and had strong independent movement (e.g., 2020-2022).
By contrast, from 2023 onwards there has been a marked increase in the price of gold, as reflected in the futures price. That was driven by a myriad of factors ranging from economic uncertainty, inflation, and a weakening USD that led to increased central bank purchases. Understandably gold mining floated as well, yet it coincidentally also floated broad mining. The aggressive tech sector expansion during the same period explains that situation.
Finally, the private portfolio recorded steady increases in net investment over the course of the sample period. This largely follows comparable trends in public investment, where increases in private interest coincided with the 2016 and 2020 rises in mining investment value. Notably, though, its response to the public market swing higher in the last two years has been far more muted, potentially implying that private markets intend to “wait and see” with their present levels of investment instead of piling onto the trend.
Looking Ahead
The last two quarters have been quite impactful on our Cobalt-charted conclusions. In the first two quarters of 2026, gold mining and futures prices fell from their end-of-2025 highs. Broad mining also dropped slightly, though with more support from its other mineral demands.
Looking forward, we expect a continued stall in private interest (though perhaps not a decrease) as elevated gold prices persistently yield profitability for miners and the continued tech buildout provides robust demand for broad minerals in the near future.
The counter case: economic uncertainty could stall industrial demand while elevated gold prices could discourage safe-haven investment into gold, thereby decreasing demand for all minerals across the board. That risk may itself be part of the reason for the broad market pullback we have seen so far this year.
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