Gold at $5,000: What the Price Tells You and What It Doesn’t

Gold surpassed $5,000 an ounce earlier this year. Two years prior, it was at $2,000. Such a jump draws attention from investors, project owners, and mining firms everywhere. But if you’ve been in this field long enough, you know a rising gold price is only part of the story. The other part is what you do with it.

We spoke with two RESPEC experts who view this market from very different perspectives. Patrick Wieck is the Market Sector Lead for Metals, working with mining companies on the technical and engineering aspects of project development. Tim Alch is a Senior Mining and Energy Strategist with more than 30 years of experience in equity research and investment advisory. Together, they provide a comprehensive view, and it’s more complex than the headline price indicates.

The drivers are real. So is the volatility.

Both Patrick and Tim highlight legitimate structural forces behind gold’s increase. Central banks worldwide have been buying gold at high rates for 5 to 7 years, steadily increasing reserves that support long-term demand. More recently, institutional and individual investors have returned to hard assets as a hedge because concerns about inflation and geopolitical uncertainty have made other investments seem less reliable.

“The uncertainty around what U.S.-based policy means for global economies is driving investors toward gold as a safe haven. Whether gold truly lives up to that moniker is debatable. But enough people believe it that it becomes self-reinforcing.” — Patrick Wieck

Tim provides the longer view.

“Exploration spending over the last decade has not kept pace with demand. The spike in price has refocused the industry’s attention—but exploration doesn’t always translate to an economic discovery, nor production. That gap is real, and it matters.” — Tim Alch

RBC Capital Markets’ Global Commodity Strategy Research* confirms that the pace of this rally has surprised even experienced analysts, as has the recent swoon. Gold reached 51 all-time highs throughout 2025, then hit eight more in January 2026 alone, significantly above the previous year’s monthly average. Historically, major rallies have lasted between 1,062 and 1,168 days on average. The current rally (as of January 2026) is approximately 844 days old, indicating there may be more room to grow, although RBC is also clear that there are no strict limits on gold’s duration or direction.

That last point is important. In late January 2026, gold dropped almost $500 in a single day—the biggest 1-day decrease in years—just days after surpassing $5,500. The rally is genuine. So is the volatility. Both are true simultaneously, and any project assessment that overlooks the second is incomplete.

The gap between price and project reality

A $5,000 gold price has an interesting side effect: it makes many projects appear viable when they aren’t. Patrick observes this firsthand. “We’ve seen a lot of lower-grade projects come to market. That doesn’t mean they’re not viable. It means the engineering and resource definition need to be much more thorough. There are good projects out there now, and there are poor ones. Telling the difference is where the real work begins.”

Permitting adds another hurdle. Even a well-structured project with strong fundamentals is hard to sell to investors if it faces a 10- to 15-year permitting timeline. Recent federal efforts—including FAST-41, the program established under the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act, which accelerates critical mineral projects through the federal permitting process—offer some relief. But they don’t solve the fundamental challenge.

“If I’m an investor with a million dollars to put to work, I’m going to think hard before placing it in a project where I can’t see a return for 15 years. That’s not how investors think, and the industry has to reckon with that.” — Patrick Wieck

“It boils down to the confidence an investor has in three things: management, the project, and its jurisdiction. Underneath each one of those, there are an enormous number of variables. Getting all three right is what separates projects that attract serious capital from those that don’t.” — Tim Alch

The companies that come out ahead in this cycle won’t just be the ones who moved fastest. They’ll be the ones who identified and asked the hard questions early.

That’s where RESPEC comes in. We help clients ask the right questions, define their resources, secure permits, raise capital, and build the teams to carry their projects forward. No single lens is enough. We bring all of them, based on the client’s individual, specific project needs.

 

 

*Market data referenced from RBC Capital Markets Global Commodity Strategy Research, January 2026. Used with permission.