What’s driving gold’s wild ride in 2026: Stocks & Markets Podcast | Official Website of Louis Velazquez, entrepreneur, finance guy and tech innovator

This article is based on The Stocks & Markets Podcast. Hosted by Chris Versace, veteran Wall Street investor and lead portfolio manager for TheStreet Pro, these weekly podcasts are available early to members of TheStreet Pro investing club.

Whether it’s the Olympics or Wall Street, there’s just no getting away from gold.

Many of the world’s greatest athletes are competing in the 2026 Winter Olympics while the price of gold has been soaring and falling like a hyperactive ski jumper.

Gold had been rising dramatically over most of January before falling sharply in late January and earlier this month. Spot gold was trading around $5,065 per troy ounce on Feb. 12, according to market data.

David Miller, portfolio manager of the GOLY ETF and CIO at Catalyst Funds, stopped by the Feb. 11 edition of TheStreetPro’s Stocks & Markets Podcast to discuss the world’s most precious metal with Chris Versace, the podcast host and manager for TheStreet Pro Portfolio.

Miller explained that several factors have been propelling gold prices dating back to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The U.S. wanted to do something to punish Russia for violating Ukraine’s sovereignty and invading Europe, but it wasn’t clear exactly what to do,” he said.“They seized oligarchs’ yachts and other things, but another thing they did, which had a huge impact on the relationship of the U.S. dollar and the petrodollar to other countries’ relationships with our currency, is we weaponized the SWIFT banking system against Russia to freeze roughly $300 billion of their U.S.-dollar-denominated assets, primarily Treasury bonds and Treasury bills.”

David Miller, portfolio manager of the GOLY ETF, says several factors have been propelling gold prices.

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Expert traces gold price surge to invasion of Ukraine

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) is a secure, global messaging network used by over 11,000 financial institutions in more than 200 countries to transmit standardized, authorized instructions for international money transfers. Without SWIFT, cross-border financial traffic is more difficult.

“The problem was that while it certainly did punish Russia, we also shot ourselves in the foot,” Miller said.

More on gold:

He said China held about $750 billion in U.S. Treasury securities at the time, which may have influenced their thinking on hard-currency assets like gold.

“But I’d much prefer to have $760 billion in gold bars,” he added. “If I were a Chinese central banker, sitting in a vault in Beijing that the U.S. government couldn’t get its hands on, that would be a real hard currency asset.”

Miller said that any emerging-market nation that may be at odds with the U.S. is likely thinking the same way — holding gold as a hard-currency asset that cannot be seized.

“And then we did things to exacerbate the situation like threatening 100% tariffs on a number of these countries, seizing Venezuela’s dictator, the conflicts with Iran,” he continued.“These have really poured fuel on that fire of breaking the relationship of what has always been known as the petrodollar, or using the U.S. dollar as a Treasury reserve asset for other countries and replacing that with gold.”

Versace asked about the impact of President Donald Trump’s volatile actions on the geopolitical front.

“That’s certainly good for gold,” Miller replied. “But we also have a whole other dynamic that got started even before Trump came into office, which was both parties have been spending like drunken sailors.”

He said the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 and the One Big Beautiful Bill have “added trillions of dollars to the deficit.”

“If you have $38 trillion of debt and you keep spending $2 trillion more than you bring in in tax revenue, you’re deliberately debasing your currency versus all other assets,” Miller said.“And obviously, nobody can print gold. And that is very good for gold. So you combine these factors. That’s been explosive for gold prices.”

Miller said the dollar will continue to be debased compared with gold as long as the U.S. government intends to run a large deficit.

“Does that mean the purchasing power of gold will go up?” Miller asked.“No. Does that very likely mean that the price of gold will go up versus U.S. dollars? Absolutely. I think the volatility in gold will continue.”

“I think the bull market in gold will continue. But over a week ago, gold sold off roughly 10% and silver sold off 27%, according to market data. That really changed that dynamic.”

If an investor is building a portfolio traditionally anchored in fixed income, Miller said it “makes more sense” to allocate to a hard-currency asset such as gold.