Why you'll regret it if you don’t buy gold

City analysts make many poor predictions but their performance has been worst when it comes to the gold price, says MoneyWeek editor Merryn Somerset Webb. Mainstream opinion only turned positive on gold as it soared up through $700 an ounce - and it then promptly plunged. But the gold story is far from over...

When I was at university, one of the biggest complaints from professors and the non-finance companies that turned up on the milk round looking for graduate trainees was that the best students wanted to go into the City. Britain's brightest showed no interest in manufacturing, science, academia or even the Foreign Office - they wanted to be institutional stockbrokers.

And even if they planned to go into law they weren't intending to become criminal barristers. No, they were aiming to get their cut of City deals by being corporate lawyers.

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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.