Bitcoin rallied sharply recently on news that Vanguard Group, one of the world’s largest asset managers, has reportedly decided to permit ETFs and mutual funds that mainly hold crypto assets to be traded on its platform. Meanwhile, we’ve previously described gold as “physical Bitcoin,” observes Ed Yardeni, editor of Yardeni QuickTakes.
Interestingly, the Vanguard move goes against a longstanding position held by the firm’s previous CEO, who had stated that Vanguard would never ever offer Bitcoin ETFs or similar products. But apparently things have changed since the departure of the last executive.
Like cryptocurrency, we have no way of valuing gold. However, when the price of gold rose to a new record high of $2,000 per ounce last year, we turned bullish because many central banks have been adding gold after the US and EU froze Russia’s foreign currency reserves in February 2022.
When it rose above $3,000 earlier this year, we looked at the gold price chart and identified a rising channel, suggesting that $4,000 was a reasonable price target for the end of this year. It has been consolidating just above that level for several weeks. We expect it to continue doing so until mid-2026, before resuming its climb toward our year-end target of $5,000.
We are still targeting a gold price of $10,000 by the end of 2029, when we expect the S&P 500 Index (^SPX) to trade at a record 10,000. Gold tends to be inversely correlated with the S&P 500 on a cyclical basis. But their trends on a long-term basis have been nearly identical.
