We're seeing a profound change in the world monetary order that is reflecting the change in the world economic order and political order. Namely, it used to be the United States was dominant and the rest of the world doesn't want to have the US be able to control its finances through the US dollar and the only alternative really is the gold.
Hi there, I'm Liz Thomas, head of investment strategy at SoFi, and this is the important part. How do you spot an investing trend before anyone else? You can start by asking Jan Van Eck. Jan is the CEO of VanEck, one of the world's largest providers of ETFs and mutual funds. So, you can say he's got a little bit of experience at that. His firm pushed for a Bitcoin ETF years before the regulators allowed it. His family launched the first gold fund in the late 60s and Jan is here today to share the family recipe for trend spotting and how you can apply it to your own portfolio. Jan, thank you so much for joining me.
Oh, it's great to be here, Liz. I look forward to our discussion.
Okay, let's start with gold because that's such a hot topic right now. And by the way, nothing in this episode should be treated as a recommendation from SoFi and it is not investment advice. But let's set the stage here. VanEck has the gold miners ETF, right? But I want to talk about gold as an asset class right now just by itself. And I honestly think it might be an asset class by itself right now. It falls into the precious metals category, but it's had such a good run. So performing so well even compared to the S&P which is not normal right over history. How long do you think that continues? So far in 2026 it's still happening.
Yeah, well I think it can happen for up to another 10 years or so, Liz. Very, very bullish. I think what you're seeing, we tend to look at long-term historical trends in terms of trying to inform our outlook. Because actually if you look at history, the world changes dramatically in terms of how it changes and then also it changes very fast. And so I think we're seeing a profound change in the world monetary order that is reflecting the change in the world economic order and political order. Namely, it used to be the United States was dominant and now in the next 10 years, India will sort of join China in terms of being a super economy, if you will, it's going to be the size of continental Europe. So the US's share of GDP is just smaller and smaller and the rest of the world doesn't want to have the US be able to control its finances through the US dollar and the only alternative really is the gold.
So okay, so 10 years today as we record this, this is January 21st, gold is still under $5,000. Are you in the camp that it hits something above 5,000? What's that 10-year market like?
It's hard for me to kind of price target and also the good thing about long-term trends, Liz, is I don't have to worry about getting the projection right in the next quarter or 2026 because really in the short term, who knows? I think over the next 10 years, I think it could go yes, definitely above 5,000. We're almost there. 10,000 even higher if these current trends continue.
Yeah. So I mentioned in the intro your family started the first gold fund in the 60s. That was when the price of gold was fixed at $35 an ounce, right? So let's talk about that. And to the extent that you have knowledge of it, why did they do that? What did they see in the market at the time that made that such a good opportunity?
Right. So the old world used to be centered around the gold standard. And I don't think I even understood what the gold standard was until recently. But basically, think of all financial institutions as Jan and Liz setting up their own bank. And other people would say, well, I don't trust Jan and Liz, right? Why should I trust them with my money? And we would say, well, look at our vaults. We have a lot of gold. Right? Because really, they don't know what we're doing with their money. And then that became true for governments as well. So all the European countries, the United States, when we got wealthy, we'd buy gold to show people, well, we're trustworthy. There's something there. Because in the early days, governments didn't bail out banks. Even states went bankrupt, right? So gold is just reverting to that role as the number one world's currency because basically these days countries, if the US disagrees with them and it seems like we're not going to seize their assets, right? So that's basically reverting to that world of a hundred years ago. Then to your question what happened in the 1960s, basically everyone started trusting the dollar without a gold backing per se and then we started printing a lot of money in the 1960s and so my father said listen, you're not going to be able to maintain your value against gold when your value of paper is going like this and the amount of gold you have isn't changing and the market isn't going to accept that. And so, correct, the gold was linked to the dollar for a long period of time. It didn't change at all. And the prediction was that link is going to break. And three years later, it did in 1971. And then gold went from 35 to $800 an ounce in the 1970s when we had all these inflationary issues.
So today, the dollar and gold are not linked, right? At least not explicitly, but they have relationships generally speaking. So would you say there are parallels now to what happened back then with nations around the world not trusting the central banking system, maybe not trusting where to put their reserves. So we're reverting to gold as the only option to get it away from the dollar. And there's been a few years ever since Russia invaded Ukraine where the dollar got weaponized and I think nations around the globe saw that and said, 'Oh no, not us.' We don't want that to happen to us. So here we are with gold having this epic run. Would you say then that the dollar is not trusted anymore? And because there's this constant fight that goes on, it heats up every five or six years and then it dies again. And it's that the dollar is no longer going to be the global reserve currency. It's going to go away, right? It's changing. But it never really does. So, is that actually going to happen this time?
Well, there are a lot of things happening and I do agree that gold can go up and the dollar still be an important currency in the world. I really think we need to decouple what's happening in the United States with the fact the world wants gold as a global currency. Because people used to say, oh we have inflation in the 70s that's why gold hit record highs in the 70s. Forget inflation. Gold hit record highs last year and inflation came down, right?
So, let's talk to the retail investor a little bit here because the way that the retail investor can access something like gold is through ETFs, right? ETFs like GLD or IAU, they can't, I mean, I suppose they could go buy physical gold, but generally speaking, it's through ETFs. The VanEck ETF for gold miners, ticker GDX, that gets lumped into that category a lot, right? A gold ETF, but it's different and it acts differently than the actual gold ETFs do. So, if you're talking to a retail investor, how would you tell them to use something like a gold miner ETF versus a gold ETF in their portfolio?
As a compliment, I'd start with gold bullion. And we have an ETF in that area as well, but miners, it's great in an upcycle. The miners were up something like 150% last year. Gold was up 60%. But in a down cycle, it's way worse. So from 2011 to 2016, gold shares went down 90%. So part of that is they're not great businesses. They're not finding a lot of gold these days, the mining companies. But basically, I would say first, do I want to own gold? And those are the conversations VanEck loves to have with investors is what are the asset classes in your portfolio? We think that's the most important question. We definitely think that this is a good time and I'm not always advocating for gold by the way, but we do think this is a good cycle for real assets and for gold and then gold shares and silver which is kind of a bonkers asset. It's like the Bitcoin of 2026, right? Those are complements to a core gold holding in our portfolios.
You've said before that there are some parallels between Bitcoin and gold. I want to dig into some of that in a few different ways. First of all, there are some investors, not all, that would call Bitcoin a store of value. I think there are many investors that would call gold a store of value. Where do you fall on that? Are they both a store of value? And should they be treated that way by investors?
They're both limited in supply. So I would say that they are both stores of value in my mind, right? I definitely think algorithmically that's how Bitcoin is designed and gold just because of the force of nature supply doesn't increase a lot. So I do think that's the role they play in people's portfolio. I would say the other aspect is they don't pay dividends and they don't pay interest. And there's some investors I always like to point out like Warren Buffett who doesn't like Bitcoin or gold, right? They just think store value assets are not important in people's portfolios. You know, you pointed out their performance can be good and we think their diversification is really important in portfolios.
Well, and what's happened in Bitcoin, I think this recent period where Bitcoin has seen so much volatility and again as we're recording this on January 21st, the last time I checked, Bitcoin was somewhere in the 87,000 range and that's down from 97,000 about a week ago. Gold hasn't seen draw downs like that recently, right? So, the behavior of them is so different that I think that's where investors start to struggle if they look at both of them and say, 'Okay, I'm treating each of these as a store of value, but this one is moving completely independently from the other and on things that I don't even entirely understand. How do you set expectations for something like Bitcoin through different environments?'
Bitcoin and gold I think to a certain extent are like currencies or bonds or some other asset classes that actually can change how they behave in different economic environments. So basically my whole story about gold is one fundamental change. We're in a new paradigm and we're in a world that's more diversified and they want gold. Bitcoin is kind of like I describe it like a teenager. It goes through these different phases of growing up. So the phase that it's in right now started since COVID where its correlation to the NASDAQ is much higher, right? So right now it's behaving like a risk asset, like stocks and bonds basically. So yeah, Bitcoin is selling off and so that is not as desirable to me because I rather have something like gold that went up yesterday and everything else went down. I want something that Bitcoin used to have a zero correlation against everything else but it rose during COVID. I hope it grows out of its teenage years. That's my hope because otherwise it's a little bit compromised, right? It adds a little bit less value in your portfolio if it just follows the NASDAQ, which a lot of people have exposure to already.
And you've said recently that you'd like to let Bitcoin rest for 3 to 6 months. Does that mean you think it's going to become a 20-something in 3 to 6 months? It's out of its teenage years or is it just a bout of volatility that we're in? What's the magic of that time frame?
The one of the first things you learn about Bitcoin is that supply is limited. The second is every four years, the miners that run the network get paid half of what they used to get paid. And that has caused this four-year cycle in Bitcoin where 2026 like 2022 it should be underperforming. For the first time, it was supposed to again by the cycle go up in 2025. Instead, it went down. And so this four-year cycle was broken last year. It was of major asset classes, it was the worst performing. So, the four-year cycle was broken. And I think a lot of people were just selling in advance of this four-year cycle, which would have been this year, right? It makes sense. If you think it's going down in 26, sell in late 2025. So, I think again, it's that part of whatever Bitcoin was, it's not going to repeat it as it gets older and more mature as an asset.
It does. It does. And that's interesting actually. I hadn't thought about that. And that's why I give it a break because it's time to have its four-year annual pause. In terms of negative performance. And there are a lot of theories out there as to what's going to happen this year with Bitcoin, but I think we look at it as sort of making a bottom. And if you like it long term, which we do, it's time to buy selectively. I just kind of say things don't turn around in a month, Liz. So if this year is a bad year and maybe even if the year started in September, we still have time, right? Well, and bottoming is a process for any asset. It happens over time. You find double bottoms, right? It sort of grinds sideways at the bottom for a while before the bottom has actually been found. And of course, you can always find the absolute bottom, but usually it takes a while. Do you think that the investors buying Bitcoin are the same investors as the ones buying gold?
So, one of the things that attracted me to Bitcoin actually in 2017 was a lot of our gold investors who loved speculative small cap gold stocks were buying Bitcoin instead because Bitcoin was giving them a better return. So, there was definitely an overlap like they got store value investing. They're like, I see this is my kind of asset, right? However, there are big generational differences now, I would say in the Bitcoin community, we keep adding. So certainly, younger people in their 20s and 30s, this has been proven time and again, are much more attracted to digital assets than your traditional gold investors. So, demographics wise, I think that's definitely true. I just think, the thing that's astounding to me and why I'm bullish gold, American investors are still not that interested in gold even though it's performed so well over the last several years. We had net outflows out of GDX last year. So really what I think was happening is people stopped being negative, meaning they were covering their shorts, which isn't a complicated dynamic, but that was it. Like I didn't see a ton of money going into gold or gold share ETFs. The rest of the world's obviously buying actively, but US investors are asking themselves, did I miss it?
And that's like, did I miss Bitcoin? And then it's very hard to get them to say, no, you don't have to buy your full 1% or 2% today. Just buy $20 worth. Like get over that psychology, right? But when it's going up at 1% a day, people are psyched out. And that's a big problem in the stock market, too, I guess, right? We hit all-time highs and people like, 'Oh, I can't buy at the top of the market.' But that's investor psychology, right? That's your job, right? Well, and you look, you pull up a chart and it's like, well, I look at this chart going from the bottom left to the upper right so fast. How could I enter now?
Okay. You're bullish on gold. You said a 10 year. This could go on for 10 more years. And you've been quoted recently saying that you think Bitcoin can get to $2.9 million per coin. By 2050. So pretty bullish Bitcoin over the long term. 2050 is a long time away. And I realize both of these are long-term strategies. So I'm going to ask you and maybe an unanswerable question like your favorite child. Are you more confident in gold or in Bitcoin over a 10-year period?
Sure. It's a close call. Yeah. By the way, 2.9 million was a speculative number by one of my colleagues, but I do think it, I haven't sold any Bitcoin and I think it will continue to kind of mature and evolve and you see that with the ETF adoption and things like that. So, I think at some point it could catch up.
