Gold & Silver Investors Who Just Do Nothing Have Been Winning

Well, don’t just do something; stand there!

As backwards as that sounds, it turns out this might be a pretty good investment strategy.

Research conducted by Dalbar, Fidelity, and Vanguard reveals that dead people tend to be better investors than the living.

However, holders of gold and silver can also adopt the strategy a dead person would employ: doing absolutely nothing.

Based on this research, the best investors aren’t necessarily the smartest people. They don’t have degrees in finance. They aren’t even the most experienced. Either they are deceased – or still walking among us, simply having forgotten they have an investment account.

In either case, your investment is not tinkered with; you just let it ride. You don’t overreact to every news headline. You don’t panic when the Dow has a down day. You don’t freak out when you see a precious metals ticker bleeding red.

Business coach Nat Berman put it this way in a post on X:

“The best investors are patient, consistent, and almost boring. They set a strategy, automate contributions, and let compounding do the work. They don’t let emotions drive decisions and are humble about what they can’t predict. The traits that create exceptional investors are all learnable: patience, consistency, humility, and emotional control.”

One key point here is whether someone gets caught up in emotion.

Of course, humans are emotional beings, and emotions often drive our decision-making. In fairness, when gold and silver sold off steeply on the last trading day in January, it was uncomfortable watching the negative numbers get bigger and bigger.

Brad Klontz is a certified financial planner and financial psychologist. He says human behavior is the biggest threat to our portfolio.

“It’s them selling [investments] when they’re in a panic state, and conversely, buying when they’re all excited. We are our own worst enemy, and it’s why dead investors outperform the living.”

Klontz said humans are evolutionarily wired to “run with the herd but that is absolutely the wrong way to invest.

Big market moves can trigger a “fight or flight” response in our brains, and our intuition can drive immediate emotional responses.

If you watch the markets at all, you know that every bit of news seems to drive some kind of move. But almost all of them are short-lived. So, you don’t want to react to every new post that pops up on X. Trying to time the markets based on what has become a 30-second news cycle can wreck your savings and your sanity.

It’s not that you should ignore headlines completely, but you should always try to put them in a broader context. This is why we constantly emphasize the macro environment here at Money Metals.

When you see a price swing, ask yourself, “Did anything just happen signaling a change in the fundamentals?” If the answer is yes, well, it might be time to make a move. But if the answer is no, you probably want to stand pat.

The best course is to avoid overexposure to any single investment, keep your emotions in check, stay focused on the fundamentals, and avoid reacting to every news headline or price move.

And when it comes to gold, remember that the powers that be are always going to be debasing your currency. You lose purchasing power week after week. No headline is going to change that reality!

Let’s take a look at the weekly market action in the metals here.

Gold is down nearly $150 or 2.8% on the week to come in at $5,145, although it has bounced here the last couple of days from even deeper sold off levels earlier in the week.

Similar story in silver. The white metal had pulled back quite substantially through Wednesday but has pared those losses a bit these last two days. Silver, despite the rally of the last 48 hours or so, is still off nearly $10 an ounce since last Friday’s big up day and weekly close, checking in currently at $84.66, down 10.4%. Essentially the silver market has done a complete roundtrip during what have been back-to-back fairly volatile weeks, and we’re seeing the metal trade today at basically exactly where it was this time two Fridays ago.

Turning to platinum, it too – like silver – is down double digits. The industrial metal is off 10.2% since last Friday’s close to trade at $2,139 with a few hours left in the trading week.

And finally, palladium is down a little more than $150 an ounce to check in at $1,649, off 8.6% on the week.

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