Gold has all the hallmarks of a keystone German investment

Those familiar with Gold Demand Trends - our market-leading quarterly report on global gold demand and supply - will know that gold buying in Germany has seen a pretty dramatic shift over the last couple of years. Just two years ago Germany was the second largest market for retail gold investment: it generated 185t of net bar and coin demand in 2022. That slumped to just 47t in 2023, and in the first half of this year retail investors bought a mere 5t of gold.

But there's more to this data than meets the eye. For one thing, retail investment demand is measured on a 'net' basis. That is to say, it measures the balance of new gold investments versus what investors have sold back from existing holdings. We can't infer from the data how many people hold gold relative to other investments. And it doesn't tell us anything about why people may be buying less (and/or selling more).

So we ran some research to find out.

In Q2, we commissioned Toluna to run a 10-minute online survey of more than 3,000 German investors. Such a robust sample gives us a deep insight into the attitudes and motives driving investment behaviour, along with a hefty set of data to sift through. And the findings are encouraging. Spoiler alert: Germans are not falling out of love with gold.