Hold on tight as the world catches on to gold

It looks like the ordinary investor may finally be catching on to the gold bull market. And if that happens, says Merryn Somerset Webb, there's no telling where the price of gold could end up.

I woke up on Friday morning to a conversation about gold on Radio 4's Today programme. Usually, when you hear about gold on the BBC, the conversation is led by someone who thinks the 12-year boom is less a bull market than a ludicrous bubble. Not this time.

Instead, the speaker was from gold website Bullionvault. I listened to this with a mild hangover, thanks to a late dinner party with a group that included an excellent but still reasonably mainstream fund manager. His portfolio is 10% invested in gold and the fact that we were talking about it didn't seem nuts to the rest of the party. I'm also getting an unusual number of emails about gold, including a rising number from non-financial friends, asking just how they go about buying it.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.