Western investors sold a record quantity of gold and silver using world-leading marketplace BullionVault in 2024. Yet the precious metals they own still jumped by one-fifth in Sterling terms as silver prices hit 13-year highs and gold made its strongest-ever run of new all-time records.
BullionVault users last year cut their gold investments 6.0% by weight and silver by 4.7%. But surging prices meant that clients of the West London fintech ended 2024 holding 20.7% more value in gold at £2.9 billion, while their securely-stored silver bullion rose 19.3% by value to reach £868 million on New Year’s Day.
“Record gold prices spurred record profit-taking in 2024,” says BullionVault director of research Adrian Ash. “But private investors didn’t sell gold or silver as fast as prices rose, even though rising stock markets and the highest real rate of interest on cash savings since before the global financial crisis also encouraged people to bank some of their gains and rebalance their investments.
“That shows solid commitment to precious metals as 2025 begins.”
Surveyed in December, users of BullionVault – nine in 10 of whom live in Western Europe or North America – forecast that gold will rise 17.6% this year to end at $3070 per Troy ounce (equal to £2436 at current exchange rates), with silver rising 27.6% to $36.90 (£29.28), also driven by geopolitics and worsening government deficits and debt.
The number of people choosing to sell gold fell in December, dropping 28.2% from November’s figure to a 6-month low as gold prices slipped by 0.3%. But the number of people starting or adding to their personal gold holdings also dropped, down by 20.8% to the fewest in 3 months.
Together, that edged the Gold Investor Index – a unique measure of private investor activity in physical bullion – down by 0.8 points from November’s 17-month high to finish 2024 at 54.3, up 2.9 points from a year earlier.
The index set a decade peak at 65.9 as the Covid pandemic went global in March 2020, and it set a series low at 47.5 in March last year, signalling more sellers than buyers with a reading below 50.
Across the past 12 months on average, the Gold Investor Index slipped 0.4 points to 52.6, its lowest annual level since the reading of 52.2 in 2014, when gold prices were mired in a deep bear market.
“2024 was a bull market in price only for Western investors,” says Ash. “Gold demand stayed negative for the second year running as profit-taking ran ahead of new buying, because conflict was confined to the ballot box and equity markets rose to new all-time highs.
“That calm now looks fragile as 2025 begins, and Trump’s victory in the US election has driven a surge in first-time buyers, particularly across Europe.”
The number of first-time BullionVault users worldwide rose 42.4% last year to the most since 2021, almost half of them opening their account in the last 4 months. Of those, more than 60% live in the UK, Germany or France.
The Silver Investor Index also fell in December, dropping 1.3 points from November’s 21-month high to read 52.7.
That put the index’s 2024 average at 50.8, matching the prior year’s series low on an annual basis.
By weight, investors were net buyers of silver for the second month running, adding 1.9 tonnes and taking BullionVault client holdings 0.2% higher to the most since September at 1,156 tonnes. But the retreat in silver prices gave that stockpile its lowest UK Pound value since July, down 8.9% from October’s record of £954m.
Gold meanwhile returned to net outflows after November’s steep price drop snapped a 14-month run of profit-taking, but BullionVault users sold only 45 kilograms more gold than they bought as a group.
That took client gold holdings down 0.1% to to 44.1 tonnes. More than most central banks hold and larger than all but 13 exchange-traded gold ETF trust funds, that was the lowest weight since July 2020 and 1.9% below end-October’s record value above £3.0bn.
Gold priced in the Pound set 40 new daily highs last year, a new all-time record.
