The Gold Portfolio Calculator — How Much Gold Should You Own?

What the Institutions Do

Institutional portfolio managers allocate between 5% and 15% to gold. Ray Dalio's All Weather Portfolio: 7.5% gold. The 5-15% range is large enough to affect performance during gold's strong periods and small enough that underperformance during weak periods doesn't damage the overall portfolio.

The Correlation Argument

Gold's primary value is its low or negative correlation with equities during stress periods. In 2008 financial crisis: gold rose 5% while S&P 500 fell 37%. In March 2020: gold rose 30% over the following eight months. Gold moves independently of equities during crises — portfolio stabiliser and purchasing power preserver.

A Simple Framework

• Under $50,000 investable assets: 5-10% in physical gold. Focus on liquidity — 1oz coins.
• $50,000–$500,000: 10-15% in precious metals, 70% gold / 30% silver. Mix coins and bars. Consider vault storage.
• Over $500,000: 10-20% precious metals. Gold bars for efficiency, allocated vault storage, potentially offshore allocation.

What to Do Now

What the allocation is actually for

The number matters less than knowing which job you are asking gold to do, because the two common jobs imply different sizes. If the job is portfolio insurance — something that holds up when equities do not — a small allocation does the work, because you only need enough to matter at the moment everything else is falling. If the job is preserving purchasing power across decades regardless of what equities do, the allocation is larger and the holding period is measured in decades rather than cycles.

Most people never decide which of the two they are doing, and end up with an allocation that is too small to insure anything and too large to ignore when gold has a poor decade. Decide the job first; the percentage follows from it.

Rebalancing is where the return comes from

A static allocation captures none of gold’s usefulness. The mechanism that makes a low-correlation asset worth holding is rebalancing: when gold rises as equities fall, you sell some gold at a high price and buy equities at a low one — and you do it because a rule told you to, not because you felt brave.

Set the rule in advance. A band around the target — rebalance when the allocation drifts beyond a set number of percentage points — is easier to keep than a calendar date, because it triggers when the move is large enough to be worth acting on. Write it down while you are calm. The whole point is to have a decision already made for a moment when making one is hard.

Physical, ETF, or miners — they are not interchangeable

Physical metal has no counterparty and costs you storage. A gold ETF is cheap, liquid and holdable in a tax-sheltered account, but it is a financial instrument inside the system rather than an asset outside it — which matters only in the scenarios physical gold is specifically bought for. Mining equities are not gold at all: they are leveraged, operating businesses with labour disputes, energy costs and jurisdictional risk, and they can fall while gold rises.

If gold is in the portfolio as insurance against the financial system, the vehicle has to sit outside it. If it is there as a diversifying asset in an otherwise conventional portfolio, the ETF is usually the more sensible instrument. Holding all three without deciding why is the common error.

Take liquid investable assets. Calculate 10%. Build to that target over 6-12 months rather than single purchase. Dollar-cost averaging is more disciplined than timing. Start with SilverGoldBull gold. Related: why physical gold in 2026, bars vs coins, is gold a good investment.

Allocation figures cited from published institutional portfolios describe what those managers did, not what is appropriate for you. General information, not financial advice.