Despite gold prices continuously setting historical peaks in 2025, institutional and individual investors in the US still maintain very low levels of exposure to this precious metal. According to Goldman Sachs analysts, this is a "structural opportunity" for gold prices to continue to rise in the near future.
An analysis by Goldman Sachs released on Wednesday shows that gold holdings through US investors' ETFs are currently still 6 basis points lower than the peak of 2012 - a gap that has persistently existed since gold ETFs were born in the mid-2000s.
The reason stems from a "mathematical" reality: in the past decade, the total scale of investment portfolios has increased much faster than the increase in gold prices as well as the expansion of gold trading volume.
This low allocation level is particularly noteworthy. As of Q2/2025, gold ETFs only account for about 17 basis points, equivalent to 0.17% of the total financial assets of the private sector in the US. This figure is extremely small compared to about 112,000 billion USD that Americans are holding in the form of stocks and bonds, according to Goldman Sachs research.
Caution is also clearly shown in the organizational sector. Goldman's data shows that less than half of large organizations in the US, managing assets over $100 million, have any allocation to ETF gold. Among the few institutions that invest, the proportion usually only ranges from 10 to 50 basis points. Even long-term institutional investors, considered sophisticated, only allocate an average of about 20 basis points to gold.
Paradox between recommendation and actual allocation
This situation creates a clear contrast to the views of analysts on Wall Street. Many major financial institutions such as Citi, UBS, Morgan Stanley or BlackRock have continuously made recommendations to increase the proportion of gold in their portfolios.
Founder of Bridgewater Associates - Mr. Ray Dalio, has also repeatedly emphasized the strategic role of gold in the context of macroeconomic instability.
Goldman Sachs analysts believe that the gap between the recommendations of the financial community and the actual actions of investors could become a "catalyst" for the next wave of gold price increases - provided that US investors begin to actually follow what they are advised on.
Tether wants to take advantage of the current "gold fever
In another development, Tether - the world's largest stablecoin issuing organization has announced the launch of Scudo, a new calculation unit for Tether Gold tokens. The goal of this move is to enhance the usefulness of gold as a means of payment, not just as a tool to store value.
To see the scale of this step, it should be noted that Tether is currently the third largest cryptocurrency in the world in terms of capitalization, with a total market value of about 187 billion USD.
As investors increasingly focus on preserving purchasing power, Tether believes that current conditions are favorable for restoring the historical role of gold as a means of transaction - the role that this precious metal once played in most of the economic history before the legal tender became popular.
The actual barrier that Tether wants to address lies in the complexity of valuing and trading gold in ounce troy fractions, which requires cumbersome decimal calculations, not suitable for daily commercial transactions.
Accordingly, Scudo is defined as one-thousandth of one ounce of gold troy (or of one XAUŬ), similar to how Bitcoin has the unit Satoshi.
Transactions using Scudo units or fractions instead of long decimal numbers are expected to make gold easier to use in practice. Goods and services can be listed at Scudo prices, thereby opening up the possibility of gold returning to daily economic life.
Two parallel developments - the prolonged low gold distribution in institutional investors and the improvement in trading infrastructure show that the gold price increase in 2025 may only reflect part of the awareness of the increasing role of this precious metal in the investment portfolio as well as in the wider monetary system.
