They’re selling gold.

Or at least they were.

Sun-colored metal headed into Friday down two weeks in a row, even as bullion managed to reclaim $4,000, a level traders would probably tell you is important, even if they couldn’t tell you why to save their lives.

There’s the chart. Or a chart. “Everything was going so well!”

The gold fans among you can spare me the grief. A simple math exercise which uses the median national income, the saving rate, the average retirement portfolio size and makes some reasonable assumptions about gold allocations, suggests I own a lot more gold than the median reader in absolute dollar terms. Do note: That doesn’t mean I own more gold than any individual reader (this goes under-appreciated, but some of you are far, far richer than I’ll ever be), it just means the odds of any given reader owning more gold than me are probably well below 50%.

This always reminds me of my foray into crypto, DeFi and Web3 in late-2021/early-2022. What I discovered upon plunging into that world — and I shouldn’t have been surprised — is that the vast majority of people claiming to know anything about it knew almost nothing, and the share of people claiming to own a lot of crypto and NFTs owned very little if they owned any at all.

That, perhaps more than anything else, explains why I’m hostile to gold and crypto. It’s not about gold and crypto. It’s about the people who congregate around gold and crypto. Generally speaking, they tend to be full of sh-t. In fact, it often feels like that’s a requirement for entry into the outside money insider club: “Are you a charlatan or at least could you see yourself becoming one?” Check box “yes” or “no.”

Anyway, if you were looking for a pullback to get into gold, now you have one. And thanks to Thursday’s rally, you have evidence that it’ll hedge your downside on days when risk assets are back-footed.

The figure above shows you the redemption impulse from gold funds in the week to October 29. It was the largest outflow on record, and it wasn’t close.

Of course, the $7.5 billion exodus pales in comparison to this year’s influx. As BofA’s Michael Hartnett noted, gold’s seen nearly $60 billion of inflows over the past four months alone.

Writing earlier this week, Ray Dalio offered a reasoned assessment which should be common sense and would be except that “common sense ain’t so common,” as the saying goes.

“The market-timing game, should one choose to play it (and I advise not to), is to hold the paper debt money when the interest rate is high enough to compensate for the default and devaluation risks of holding the money, but when the devaluation and default risks of the paper debt money are not adequately compensated for by the interest rate, it’s wise to hold gold,” Ray wrote. “Alternatively, one can choose not to try to time such movements and instead always hold some gold.” (Emphasis mine.)

There you go, folks. It’s not complicated. And it’s not — or shouldn’t be — contentious.