Analyst who predicted gold rally sets shocking new price target

It’s hard to imagine gold having a better year in 2026 than it has this year. 

The precious metal is up more than 65% this year and has been retesting highs set near Halloween, gaining 7.5% in the last month to get within sniffing distance of $4,400 per ounce. 

Markets that achieve that kind of vertical lift — and gold prices as measured by SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) are up 33.7% annualized and roughly 140% cumulative over the last three years — nearly always have similarly scary pullbacks, so investors’ gold nerves are on edge. 

And while gold has always been considered a hedge against rising prices and inflation has proven persistent and sticky, gold’s recent rise appears to have little to do with inflation and more to do with geopolitical risk, tariff concerns, a weakened dollar, and more. 

Gold fund manager correctly forecasted record prices

Check out the annual outlooks from most major investment firms, and you see observers are still going for gold, suggesting buyers may not be late for the party. 

In fact, the manager of a new gold and crypto fund says that gold’s rally is still in its early stages and will surpass all records over the next half-decade. 

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“After Covid is when we started seeing central banks really step up buying gold to an unprecedented level, and it hasn't really waned,” said Ben McMillan of IDX Advisors, manager of the IDX Alternative Fiat ETF (GLDB), which launched in late October and is built to give investors exposure to gold and Bitcoin as well as silver and Ethereum. “That was kind of a structural shift, not a shift along the demand curve for gold; that's a regime change.”

In a recent interview on “Money Life with Chuck Jaffe,” McMillan said that the central banks’ increased interest in buying gold, combined with the premium many investors are now willing to pay for safe assets as they play defense to mitigate geopolitical risk, along with stagnant gold mine outputs and production, and “you’ve got a massive sea change.”

At the start of 2024 – when the current rally was an emerging trend -- McMillan and IDX were starting to forecast that gold would hit $5,000 an ounce within the next five years.

Now, it looks like gold will hit the target in a little more than half that time. 

“People thought we were insane,” recalled McMillan, who also manages the IDX Dynamic Fixed Income ETF (DYFI) and other issues. “And we were saying, ‘Listen, that doesn't mean you're going to all of a sudden slot in 40% of a 60-40 portfolio into gold, but it needs to be a non-zero in our mind. And since then, I think you've seen kind of more people appreciate that.”

Commodities expert updates gold price outlook

McMillan’s gold forecast in the interview, which was part of the Dec. 10 edition of Money Life was a stunner, as he said gold has room to more than double in the next five years.

“Gold's run is not over,” he explained. “When you start to look at what the world looks like going forward -- especially with the level of debt we have and the BRIC countries starting to make real moves away from dollar-denominated transactions and dollar-denominated assets [and into a BRICs currency backed by gold] – these are very, very powerful tailwinds for gold for the foreseeable future.

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“It's not inconceivable that within the next half a decade, gold could be sitting closer to $10,000 an ounce versus where it is today.”

One other factor that could boost gold is inflation that stays higher for longer, with the blessing of the Federal Reserve, which McMillan expects.

“I think we're getting to a world where investors or people in general are just going to have to live with a new normal level of inflation,” he said. “If you look historically at, kind of since the founding of America, average inflation rates have been about 4 % a year. Obviously, since 2008, that's been suppressed.

Now we're back to 3%, which is above the Fed's target. And the Fed has no choice but to reestablish that target at a higher level.

How and when they do that is up to them, obviously, but mark my words, you will see the Fed in the next, I think, 12 months, no later than 24 months, officially peg the target inflation rate at 3% or even higher than that.”

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