The Golden Generation
In the lobbies of Singapore’s most prominent banks, a quiet revolution has been unfolding. Queues that once formed for home loan consultations and fixed deposit renewals now snake out of doors as customers — many of them in their twenties — wait to purchase gold. The yellow metal, for centuries the domain of central banks, jewellers, and cautious retirees, has found an unlikely new devotee: the millennial and Gen Z retail investor.
OCBC Bank disclosed on February 19, 2026 that two in three of its new retail investors in 2025 chose gold or silver as their first investment, overtaking equities and unit trusts. The bank’s precious-metals investor base expanded 2.5 times year on year. In January 2026 alone, new account holders on its Precious Metals Account tripled from the previous month, as gold struck a record high of US$5,608.35 per ounce on January 29 before pulling back to trade around US$4,975. Meanwhile, queues at UOB’s Raffles Place branch grew so unmanageable that the bank was compelled to introduce appointment-only purchasing for physical gold transactions.
These are not isolated data points. They are symptomatic of a profound structural shift in retail investor behaviour — one shaped by macroeconomic anxiety, a new generation’s evolving relationship with conventional financial instruments, the democratisation of commodity markets through fintech, and a global wave of safe-haven demand that shows little sign of abating.
2.5×
OCBC precious metals investor base YoY growth in 2025 66%
New OCBC investors who chose gold or silver first in 2025 3×
New account openings in Jan 2026 vs Dec 2025
The Anatomy of a Gold Rush
The proximate cause of the surge is straightforward: price performance. Gold’s ascent — up more than 16 per cent in the opening weeks of 2026 after posting multi-year gains — created the kind of headline-grabbing returns that draw retail investors who might otherwise have remained on the sidelines. Silver, more volatile and industrially sensitive, hit US$121.67 before pulling back sharply to trade around US$77.20 in mid-February, still representing a year-to-date gain of over 4 per cent.
But price alone rarely explains structural inflection points in investor behaviour. The more instructive question is why, at a moment when equity markets remain accessible and fintech platforms offer fractional ownership of virtually any asset class, first-time investors are choosing a commodity whose primary investment thesis rests on what it does not do — yield no income, pay no dividend, produce no cash flows.
The answer lies in a confluence of structural forces that have been building for years and now appear to have reached a tipping point.
Macroeconomic Anxiety as a Generational Condition
The cohort now entering investing for the first time — predominantly those born between 1995 and 2005 — came of age during a period of extraordinary financial turbulence. They witnessed the Global Financial Crisis as children, lived through COVID-19’s economic disruptions as young adults, and have spent their formative investing years navigating elevated inflation, aggressive central bank rate cycles, and persistent geopolitical instability.
For this generation, the traditional narrative that equities always outperform over the long run has been repeatedly stress-tested in ways that erode conviction. The 2022 simultaneous collapse in both equities and bonds — a rare event that shattered the foundational 60/40 portfolio diversification logic — was particularly instructive. If the two canonical asset classes of modern portfolio theory could fall in tandem, where was the hedge?
Gold provided an answer. During 2022, when the S&P 500 fell over 19 per cent and the Bloomberg Global Aggregate Bond Index declined more than 16 per cent, gold was broadly flat. For a generation that had not yet accumulated substantial equity portfolios to defend, the lesson was decisive: gold holds its value when other things do not.
“For many first-time investors, precious metals offer an accessible way to begin building wealth while serving as a hedge amid geopolitical uncertainty, inflation worries and shifting expectations around global interest rates.”
— OCBC Bank, February 2026
This sentiment has been amplified by geopolitical developments that show no sign of resolution. The war in Ukraine, persistent US-China strategic competition, and a global trend toward deglobalisation have reinforced the perception that the rules-based international order — and the dollar-denominated financial system that underlies it — faces structural stress. Gold, as the one asset class that sits outside any single sovereign’s balance sheet, benefits from this anxiety directly.
The Democratisation Effect: Small Tickets, Large Implications
A structural shift of this magnitude would not have been possible a decade ago. The minimum ticket size for institutional-grade gold exposure was historically prohibitive for retail investors, and physical gold carried the added friction of storage, insurance, and dealer margins.
The emergence of paper gold products — accounts that track spot prices without requiring physical delivery — has eliminated these barriers. OCBC’s Precious Metals Account allows purchases from as little as 0.01 troy ounce per transaction, equivalent to approximately US$50 at current prices. This sub-S$100 entry point places gold in direct competition with equity fractional shares and robo-advisory contributions as an accessible first investment.
The implication is significant: it is no longer meaningful to discuss retail gold investors as a category distinct from mainstream retail investors. The populations are now substantially overlapping, and the asset allocation decisions of the broadest segment of new investors now include gold as a credible, accessible option rather than a niche alternative.
2×
Under-40 investors on OCBC Precious Metals Account (2025 vs 2024) ~50%
Share of all precious metals investors who are under 40 +59%
UOB physical gold segment growth, YoY 2025
The Demographic Inversion
Perhaps the most striking finding in OCBC’s data is not the aggregate growth in precious metals investing, but its demographic composition. Customers under 40 accounted for approximately half of all precious metals investors on the bank’s platform, with those in their twenties recording the fastest growth in both gold and silver holdings.
This represents a demographic inversion relative to historical norms. For most of the post-war period, gold was predominantly held by older, more conservative investors seeking capital preservation in the final stages of wealth accumulation. The entry of younger cohorts at scale — as their first investment rather than as a late-career defensive allocation — fundamentally alters the demand profile for precious metals.
From a portfolio construction standpoint, this shift carries interesting implications. Young investors with long time horizons and limited current wealth have, theoretically, the greatest capacity to bear equity risk and the least immediate need for a capital preservation asset. Classical human capital theory would prescribe heavy equity tilts for investors in their twenties, with commodity exposure increasing only as retirement approaches. The revealed preference of younger investors diverges sharply from this prescription, suggesting either a fundamental recalibration of risk tolerance in this cohort, a different weighting of inflation and macro risk relative to equity market risk, or — as some behavioural economists would argue — the role of narrative and social proof in investment decision-making.
Behavioural Dimensions: Momentum, FOMO, and Social Proof
The timing of the January 2026 surge in new precious metals account openings warrants careful scrutiny. New investor numbers tripled in the month that gold hit its all-time high of US$5,608.35. This pattern — peak retail participation coinciding with peak prices — is a well-documented behavioural phenomenon variously described as momentum-chasing, the availability heuristic, or the Fear of Missing Out effect.
The mechanism is familiar from prior asset cycles. Rising prices generate media coverage. Media coverage increases salience of the asset in public consciousness. Increased salience drives retail inquiries and account openings. New entrants provide additional demand that sustains or extends the price rally, reinforcing the cycle. The critical question is whether the current precious metals rally has moved from fundamental support into speculative excess — and whether the newest cohort of retail investors is entering at a structurally disadvantaged entry point.
OCBC’s own wealth management leadership was candid on this point. Tan Siew Lee, the bank’s head of group wealth management, noted that once an asset becomes mainstream, hype can creep in, and explicitly cautioned against the temptation to chase quick gains. Her recommendation — gradual position-building through dips rather than reactive participation in rallies — reflects classical dollar-cost averaging principles applied to a commodity context.
“Young investors may feel tempted to chase quick gains, but true investing is about building long-term wealth, not speculation.”
— Tan Siew Lee, Head of Group Wealth Management, OCBC
The behavioural risks are heightened by the social amplification mechanisms that did not exist in previous gold cycles. Platforms such as TikTok, Xiaohongshu, and Telegram investment groups provide real-time propagation of price movements, entry tips, and peer validation that can compress the timeline from awareness to action dramatically. Where a previous generation might have deliberated for months before making an investment decision, today’s younger investors can open an account, fund it, and execute a trade within an hour of a viral post.
Structural Drivers: Why This Rally May Be Different
Not all of the demand driving precious metals can be attributed to retail behavioural dynamics. Several structural factors underpin the current rally that are qualitatively distinct from prior cycles and deserve independent analytical treatment.
Central bank accumulation represents the most significant structural shift. Since 2022, central banks globally — led by China, Poland, India, and Turkey — have accelerated gold purchases at a pace not seen since the immediate post-Bretton Woods era. The proximate driver is widely understood to be de-dollarisation anxiety: the freezing of Russian sovereign assets following the Ukraine invasion demonstrated to emerging market reserve managers that dollar-denominated reserves held in Western custodians were subject to confiscation risk. Gold, held physically in domestic vaults, carries no such counterparty risk. This structural sovereign demand provides a price floor that is independent of retail sentiment.
Industrial demand for silver adds a further non-speculative component to that metal’s demand profile. Silver’s use in photovoltaic cells — essential to solar panel production — means that the global energy transition has created a durable industrial demand stream that makes silver’s investment thesis partially distinct from gold’s. The rapid expansion of solar capacity across Asia implies sustained structural demand that will not disappear when retail enthusiasm fades.
Interest rate trajectory is a third structural driver. Gold’s opportunity cost — the yield forgone by holding a non-interest-bearing asset — falls as real interest rates decline. The global rate cycle appears to have turned, with the US Federal Reserve and major central banks moving toward easing. If real yields compress further over 2026 and 2027, the fundamental backdrop for precious metals remains supportive regardless of retail sentiment dynamics.
Market Infrastructure: Queues, Bottlenecks, and the Physical Premium
The surge in demand has exposed bottlenecks in Singapore’s gold market infrastructure that illuminate the gap between paper and physical markets. The queues at UOB’s Raffles Place branch, which prompted the bank to introduce appointment-only purchasing for physical gold from February 13, reflect a supply friction that exists in physical gold markets but not in paper equivalents.
Physical gold supply chains operate on longer lead times than financial markets. Refineries, mints, and bullion dealers cannot rapidly scale production in response to demand spikes. The result, during peak demand periods, is the emergence of physical premiums — the price differential between spot prices reflected in paper gold accounts and the actual transaction prices available for physical delivery.
The divergence between paper and physical markets during periods of elevated demand is not merely an operational inconvenience. It has analytical implications for how retail investors should understand the instrument they hold. A Precious Metals Account balance reflecting spot gold prices is not equivalent to physical gold ownership; the right to convert is subject to operational constraints that become binding precisely when they matter most.
Portfolio Construction: How Much Is Enough?
The enthusiasm of new investors for precious metals raises a normative question that their banks have been careful to address: what is the appropriate allocation to gold and silver in a retail portfolio?
Academic and practitioner consensus on this question is more nuanced than popular coverage suggests. Gold’s inflation-hedging qualities are robust over very long time horizons — measured in decades — but unreliable over the shorter horizons that most retail investors actually experience. Gold can underperform inflation significantly for extended periods, as it did between 1980 and 2000. The diversification argument is stronger: gold’s correlation with equities is low and, crucially, tends to become negative during equity market stress events — the periods when diversification is most valuable.
Standard institutional practice typically suggests allocations in the range of 5 to 10 per cent of a diversified portfolio. Allocations substantially above this range begin to drag on long-run expected returns given gold’s zero income yield, while allocations below provide insufficient diversification benefit to justify the operational complexity. A first-time investor whose initial allocation is entirely in gold or silver has not built a diversified portfolio; they have made a concentrated commodity bet, however understandable the intuition behind it.
Risks for the New Cohort
Against the constructive structural backdrop, several risks warrant explicit acknowledgement for investors who entered the precious metals market in late 2025 and early 2026.
Concentration risk is the most immediate concern. Investors whose first and potentially only holding is in precious metals are exposed to commodity-specific volatility without the offsetting return streams of equities or bonds. Silver’s sharp drawdown from US$121.67 to US$77.20 demonstrated the kind of move that can be psychologically and financially damaging for investors without prior experience of commodity volatility.
Currency risk affects Singapore investors holding gold denominated in US dollars. A strengthening Singapore dollar — which is managed within a nominal effective exchange rate band by the Monetary Authority of Singapore — would erode SGD-denominated returns even if USD gold prices hold steady. This is a routinely underappreciated dimension of commodity investment for non-US investors.
Finally, the entry-point risk inherent in momentum-driven participation deserves emphasis. Investors who opened accounts in January 2026, near the all-time high, face a materially different risk-return profile than those who built positions gradually over 2024 and 2025. The psychological consequences of significant early losses for first-time investors — including the abandonment of investing altogether at unfavourable exit points — should not be underestimated.
Conclusion: A New Chapter in Singapore’s Investing Culture
The gold rush of 2025 and early 2026 is more than a cyclical demand spike. It represents a generational reordering of investment preferences that will have lasting implications for how retail financial products are designed, distributed, and regulated in Singapore and across the region.
The structural drivers — macroeconomic anxiety, democratised access, central bank accumulation, and industrial demand from the energy transition — are not going away. Neither is the demographic cohort now entering the investment market with gold as its foundational asset class experience. The financial habits formed in one’s first investment tend to be sticky; the generation that started with gold may remain overweight precious metals for decades.
Whether that proves wise will depend on the future trajectory of interest rates, geopolitical stability, central bank policy, and the many variables that determine commodity prices over long horizons — none of which can be known in advance. What can be said with greater confidence is that the financial system is better served when first-time investors understand not only why they hold an asset, but under what conditions it underperforms, what risks they are bearing, and how it fits within a portfolio designed to serve their actual long-run financial goals.
In that sense, the most important observation in OCBC’s data may not be the 2.5 times growth in its precious metals investor base, but the counsel from its head of wealth management that true investing is about building long-term wealth, not speculation. For the golden generation, that lesson — applied not only to gold but to every asset class they will encounter — is the one that matters most.
KEY DATA AT A GLANCE
Gold all-time high (Jan 29, 2026): US$5,608.35/oz • Gold on Feb 19, 2026: US$4,975/oz • Silver 2026 high: US$121.67/oz • Silver on Feb 19, 2026: US$77.20/oz • OCBC precious metals investor base growth (2025 YoY): +150% • UOB Gold Savings Account volume growth (2025 YoY): +48% • UOB physical gold segment growth (2025 YoY): +59%