Asia’s super rich advised to add more gold to their portfolios to protect assets amid storms pounding equity markets
Gold has been hammered of late, and some advisers are telling their wealthy clients to take advantage of lower prices and add to their stockpiles.
Advisers to Asia’s super rich think their clients should put more of their money into gold, taking advantage of price declines to buy the yellow metal amid volatile global markets and US-China trade tensions, a new report said.
A survey of these advisers found a preference for gold holdings amounting to 5 per cent to 10 per cent of total assets. That is up from an earlier recommendation of 3 per cent to 5 per cent, according the report, “Going for Gold”, which was released on Wednesday by US financial services firm INTL FCStone.
Most advisers in the survey – 62 per cent – said their clients should or maybe should increase their weighting in gold, versus 38 per cent who said they should not. The survey was of 174 private banks, family offices, wealth management advisers and other market experts in Asia.
“Not only does Asia, and especially Singapore, offer a remarkably complete and professional gold market infrastructure, but the current global economic, financial and geopolitical factors could be considered as highly supportive of the rationale to hold and grow the portions of gold in any [high net worth] portfolio,” said Martin Huxley, head of precious metals Asia at INTL FCStone.
Investors in China and India are big gold buyers.
Meanwhile, the number of ultra-wealthy in China has grown, with those holding at least 10 million yuan (US$1.5 million) in investible assets booming from 180,000 individuals in 2006 to nearly 1.6 million in 2016, according to the fifth “China Private Wealth Report” by Bain & Company and China Merchants Bank.