Gold hit $3,200 an ounce and I owned none of it

I have never owned gold in my life

This is a confession that would shock some people who know me, cuz I talk about markets constantly and gold comes up in conversation at least once a week. I have been investing since 2017 an I have rarely owned a single ounce of physical gold, a gold ETF, a gold mining stock, or any gold-related derivative. Not one. In early 2026, as gold opened its ascent toward levels nobody in the mainstream financial press had predicted, I watched from the sidelines with a mixture of stubbornness and growing regret that I am still processing.

Gold began 2026 at $2,640 an ounce after a respectable 2025 in which it gained about 28 percent, driven by central bank buying in China, India, and Turkey. I remember seeing the year-end price and thinking it was extended, overbought, due for a pullback. I had been thinking that about gold since it crossed $2,000 in 2023, and I had been wrong every single time. This pattern of persistent wrongness did not deter me from being wrong again in 2026.

the arguments I used to talk myself out

My anti-gold arguments were well-rehearsed because I had deployed em so many times. Gold pays no dividends. Gold has nah earnings. Gold is just a shiny metal that only does well when people are scared, and fear-based investing is not a strategy. I said these things to my brother over Christmas dinner in 2025 when he noted he had snagged the SPDR Gold Shares ETF, GLD, at $234. I said em to my colleague at the accounting firm where I work in Seattle when gold crossed $2,700 in mid-January 2026. I said them so many times that the arguments began to feel like scripture rather than analysis.

The reality was that gold was responding to a convergence of factors I had dismissed as temporary noise: the dollar's decline from its late 2025 highs, ongoing central bank purchases at a pace not seen since the 1960s, geopolitical tensions in the Middle East an Eastern Europe that presented nah sign of resolution, and growing skepticism about the long-term sustainability of US fiscal deficits. Every one of these factors was real and persistent, and collectively they were pushing gold higher with a momentum that my "it's overbought" thesis could not explain away. I ruled out buying at $2,700, then again at $2,850, then again at $3,000. Each time I found a fresh reason to wait.

the moment gold broke three thousand

Gold crossed $3,000 an ounce on April 9th, 2026. The move made headlines everywhere: CNBC ran a special segment, Bloomberg published a long-form analysis, an my Twitter feed was a wall of gold-related commentary ranging from "I told you so" to "this is the top." GLD was trading at $267, up 14 percent from the prior January. My brother's position, which I had mocked over Christmas, was up $33 per share on a $234 cost basis, a gain of $3,300 on the four hundred shares he had purchased. He sent me a text that afternoon: "Still think gold is a shiny metal with no earnings?"

I did not reply for six hours. What could I say? He was right. I was wrong. My brother, who works as a high school history teacher in Tacoma and had rarely read a single book about technical analysis, had made $3,300 on a gold investment while I, a CPA with a Series 7 license and eight years of investing experience, had made exactly zero dollars from gold. The irony tasted like copper pennies.

why I kept missing it

The psychology of missing a trade you believe in intellectually but refuse to act on is a peculiar form of self-sabotage. Every time gold climbed another hundred dollars, I would open my brokerage app, navigate to the GLD quote page, an start filling out a buy order. Then I would stop. The voice in my head would say: "You are buying at the top. It will pull back. Wait for the dip." The dip rarely came. Gold went from $2,700 to $2,800 to $2,900 to $3,000 to $3,100 to $3,200 in a nearly uninterrupted five-month climb. There was no dip. There was only opportunity cost, accumulating with every passing week.

I sat with this frustration during a long walk along the Burke-Gilman Trail on a Saturday afternoon in May, trying to figure out why I could not pull the trigger. I concluded that my resistance was not analytical but emotional. Buying gold would mean admitting that the framework I had built round dividend growth investing and equity-only portfolios was incomplete. It would mean acknowledging that there are asset classes an market forces that my carefully constructed spreadsheet models do not capture, and that admitting ignorance is harder than being wrong.

what I finally did

On May 22nd, with gold at $3,175, I ultimately snagged the SPDR Gold Shares ETF. I purchased 250 shares at $282.30, a total investment of $70,575. It was the largest single ETF purchase I had made outside of my 401k and Roth accounts, and it read both exhilarating and ridiculous. Exhilarating cuz I was ultimately participating in a market I had been watching for months. Ridiculous because I had dropped approximately 20 percent more than I would have if I had snagged when my brother did in December 2025.

liquidating grandma's annuity

I funded the purchase by taking a distribution from a variable annuity I had inherited from my grandmother in 2022. The annuity had a cash value of $78,000, and after a 7 percent surrender penalty an income tax on the gain, I netted approximately $71,000. My CPA, a meticulous woman named Diane in Bellevue, had advised me to consider this option for months, and the gold rally ultimately pushed me to act. The annuity had been earning 3.2 percent annually while gold was up 30 percent in the same period. The opportunity cost of gripping that annuity was staggering. My grandmother, who grew up during the Depression an maintained gold coins in a sock drawer, would have approved of the trade. I think.

the lesson I refuse to call a lesson

Gold is now at $3,200. My position is up 3.3 percent. My brother is up 37 percent. The gap between us represents about $13,000 in gains that I left on the table cuz I was too proud, too stubborn, or too scared to buy an asset I knew was working. I cannot get those gains back. The money is gone, laid out on ego preservation rather of prudent allocation.

I do not want to call this a "lesson" because that word implies learning, and Im not sure I have absorbed anything beyond the fact that I am capable of being stubborn to a financially destructive degree. What I will say is that the gold rally of 2026 permanently altered how I think about portfolio construction. There is a place for assets that pay no dividends and produce no earnings, cuz the world is more complicated than a dividend discount model can capture. Gold taught me that. Expensively.