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SIMON BROWN: I’m chatting with Alex Tsepaev. He is chief strategy officer at B2PRIME Group.
Alex, appreciate the time today. I want to talk about gold as a safe haven, but I want to go back to Tuesday first. On Tuesday this week we saw everything being sold the world over – to varying degrees. Gold as well. A lot of folks are thinking hang on, if gold is a safe haven, why is it also being sold off?
This really is a case of ‘in crisis everything gets sold’. Correlations pretty much go to one.
ALEX TSEPAEV: Simon, it’s a pleasure to be here. And still gold is a safe haven, right? So we live in a very unstable world and it’s about long-term strategy, not short-term gaps.
Now, I really think that the market priced all the war months ago when we saw all this spike, and currently gold is driven on the one hand by institutional factors such as war tariffs, all the political news.
But on the other hand it’s also driven by behavioural finance where you have a hype, like in the last ten years we’ve had a hype on crypto, and everybody was looking at crypto. Now everybody is looking at gold. That’s why you have these two factors.
Yes, it’s not as stable as it was, but still in the long term it’s a pretty nice price.
SIMON BROWN: I take your point. It is still that sort of safe haven. Central banks as well are all there. You wrote a piece recently talking around some common mistakes that that investors make, particularly when buying gold during periods of global uncertainty. What are some of the mistakes that people are jumping into?
ALEX TSEPAEV: Well, the first one is over-leverage because greed is good – but up to a certain point. And many investors because of greed try to get into bigger positions and don’t think long term. They’re not used to the volatility of plus/minus 10% every day. So that’s why they just get stopped out and lose most of their capital. This is like a first big mistake.
A second mistake is that, look, gold should be a part of your portfolio, not the only asset. When you are focused on speculation without a project, without a mass behind you, 90% you’re going to lose.
SIMON BROWN: Yes, I get your point on that. Absolutely. And leverage, as you say, leverage is great until it goes the other way.
I’m thinking here sort of the investor in the street. Are there some signals that they can watch for, to try and understand where gold is going to be going in the shorter term? Longer term I think the general agreement is it’ll be higher in a year or three. Shorter term?
ALEX TSEPAEV: Oh, this is where a year ago I could answer you. Now, [both chuckling] now you have Twitter for … and it can shift the whole market within a minute.
Of course there are some indicators like the US dollar. If the dollar weakens gold becomes stronger. What can you do on the short term? Just when you see the news, look at the main institutional inflows– that’s it.
SIMON BROWN: Okay, I take your point. It often is the case as an institution. We are talking about gold’s safe-haven status. It needs to be a part of your portfolio and certainly making sense as a long-term holding. Are there points where it actually might add more risk than protection? Is that really around leverage? Around too much exposure? Or are there other concerns as well?
ALEX TSEPAEV: Oh, well, there are a lot of concerns because, look, in reality you can’t concentrate on one method. You just can’t, because you never know what’s going to happen. One [bit of] news can completely destroy your portfolio. That’s why you always need to have diversification.
So the main concern is whatever you plan, don’t concentrate on one method.
SIMON BROWN: Yes. Is there an ideal number for gold? I ask this of many people I interview: Do you have a perfect percentage of what gold would be in a portfolio? I have to be honest – I get varying numbers coming back. There isn’t a sort of magic number where we can all agree. It’s typically somewhere between 5% and 15%, but no magic number.
ALEX TSEPAEV: Well, look at 2025 data, when gold grew like two times – it could be more. But with current volatility, I would think it should be around …, a bit of a bigger number, because it’s still a safe haven, and still there is huge potential for growth.
SIMON BROWN: Yes. Again, it comes back to that volatility, which can be quite wild.
We’ll leave it there. Alex Tsepaev, chief strategy officer, B2PRIME Group, I appreciate the time.
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