all-time highs in 2025 — more than one record every five trading days.
quarters, and the institutions that underpin physical precious-metals
pricing were stress-tested as never before.¹
gold market settles. In a normal year, a handful of new all-time highs
would be unusual. In 2025, the mechanism delivered 53.¹ That is not a
gentle drift upward; it is a sustained, high-frequency repricing of the
benchmark.
percent.¹ The fourth quarter added another leg of gains that took the
annual average to US$3,431 per ounce, according to World Gold Council's
rose meaningfully during 2025 as investors rotated positioning more
actively. Central-bank and sovereign-wealth-fund activity accumulated to
roughly 1,000 tonnes per year — equal to at least 25 percent of the
annual mined supply — and that official-sector flow had to find a home
somewhere in the London clearing system.¹
metal moved from US$29.41 at the start of 2025 to around US$75 per ounce
at year-end, a gain of 144.82 percent. Industrial demand — solar,
electronics — collided with investor appetite and physical tightness,
and LBMA infrastructure absorbed a significantly larger volume of silver
trading than in any recent year.
central banks anchor the bid, silver's 2025 rally was driven by a
coalition of industrial fabricators, retail investors and financial
speculators with little official-sector involvement. That made the price
action more volatile intraday but no less sustained across the year. The
stride.
beginning of 2025, the 30 participating analysts expected the average
gold price for the year to be US$2,735.33 — itself a bullish number
relative to 2024.¹ The actual outcome of US$3,431 blew through that
forecast by a wide margin.
The dispersion of individual analyst forecasts is itself informative.
realised average. No single analyst — even among specialists who had
been calling for a higher gold regime for years — expected the magnitude
of the 2025 move. The industry's price-formation process, in other
words, was behind the market throughout the year.
roughly 25 percent, investors should build wider error bands into their
own expectations for the coming year. Metals Focus has publicly moved
its 2026 forecast to US$4,560 per ounce with a plausible path to
humility is an underrated asset in the current gold environment.
another. LBMA-accredited refineries had to reallocate capacity on short
notice as investment demand crowded out jewellery demand. Vault
operators in London and Zurich managed higher-than-usual turnover as
allocated-account positions moved between institutional clients.
one-kilogramme) rose sharply to service retail demand in India, China,
North America and Europe.
year, as expected in a well-functioning market. But smaller
investment-grade bars carried premiums of several percentage points at
the peak of retail demand — a direct measurable signal of the pressure
on the physical channel.
the twice-daily fix continued to operate, allocated and unallocated
accounts remained in balance, and no member refinery faced the kind of
capacity crisis that could have disrupted the delivery chain. Part of
the reason is design: the LBMA was built over a century to handle
exceptional volatility, and its members have invested heavily in cleared
and collateralised infrastructure.
clear, standardised data throughout the year, enabling the market to
absorb news without information asymmetries spreading into panic. The
transparency that the LBMA has built into its Precious Metals Market
it is the stabiliser that allows other participants to trust the
reference.
the LBMA and its member banks have progressively moved more OTC business
onto cleared and collateralised channels. That shift reduces
counterparty risk in precisely the moments when price volatility is most
likely to stress bilateral arrangements. 2025 was the first cycle in
which the bulk of that cleared-settlement infrastructure was tested
under real conditions, and it performed as designed.
touched US$5,000 in January, and Metals Focus projects an annual average
of US$