Gold investing sentiment in the UK rallied in May, edging higher from this spring’s dramatic Iran war slump as private investors bought the precious metal at lower prices using world-leading precious metals platform BullionVault.
“While sentiment among UK investors towards gold has fallen hard from the recent blow-off top, it remains exactly in line with the longer-term average,” says BullionVault director of research Adrian Ash. “First-time investing is also running historically strong despite dropping again in May.”
Tracking UK customer trading on BullionVault since 2010, the Gold Investor Index UK is a unique measure of revealed preference in the precious metals markets. Any reading above 50.0 signals that buyers outnumbered sellers. Last month it rose to 54.9, rallying 0.1 points from April’s 6.2-point crash to a 9-month low.
That slump in BullionVault’s sentiment gauge marked the steepest drop in 14 years. May’s rally then put the Gold Investor Index UK above its 5-year average by 0.1 points.
With wholesale bullion prices falling in May to the lowest monthly average since December, users of BullionVault worldwide bought more gold as a group than they sold for the third month in a row, the longest stretch of net demand since August 2023.
Last month’s inflow grew client gold holdings by another 0.2% to 43.6 tonnes, the largest in 6 months. All vaulted in each user’s choice of London, New York, Singapore, Toronto or most popular Zurich, that privately-owned stock of gold bullion is worth £4.7 billion.
“Gold continues to see-saw with crude oil as the Iran war’s energy-price shock drives interest rate forecasts higher,” says Ash.
“News of central banks flipping from record gold buying to sporadic selling also upends a key part of the New Year’s over-excitement. But gold’s long-term value in sovereign reserves is undimmed, and private investors are using the price drop to build their holdings, too.”
The monthly count of new BullionVault users in the UK retreated in May for the fourth month running, falling by 62.5% from the prior 12-month average.
But while May’s figure was the lowest in 12 months, the number of first-time UK precious-metals investors still topped the past 5 years’ median monthly average by 89.4%.
