Want to hedge against extreme events? Hold gold

It is always a good idea to hold at least some gold in your portfolio. And in these tough economic times, there is no better investment to protect your assets.

Should you still be buying gold? Regular readers will know our answer to that is yes. But a new bit of research from Oxford Economics remakes the case nicely by looking specifically at the effect of UK investors holding gold in a portfolio.

You can access the full report at www.gold.org. But the upshot of the research is to confirm that, for us, holding gold pretty much always makes sense.

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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.