Prakas buys a bit of gold every year, always on a Saturday, for the Hindu festival Diwali. This year, thousands of gold-hungry Australians and a record-breaking price surge got in the way.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he says. “Maybe I’ll just buy a smaller version … if I can’t afford [it] … just to fulfil the tradition.”
The Nepali Australian man made the hour-long trip into Sydney’s CBD on Saturday to buy gold – then turned around when he saw the 400-person queue snaking across Martin Place.
Hoping to skip the queue, he decided to buy online, but was stuck in the two-hour queue of pre-purchasers when he returned to the ABC Bullion store on Tuesday.
The price of gold had risen from about US$4,200 an ounce to more than US$4,300 in the intervening three days, continuing a two-month surge that has gained Australians’ attention.
About 1,000 people have moved through the ABC Bullion Sydney store each day for over a month, with thousands more buying online, according to the general manager, Jordan Eliseo.
Prakas, who was buying gold for Diwali from the ABC Bullion store in Martin Place. Photograph: Jessica Hromas/The Guardian
They come from all over Sydney every day, some hurrying to arrive before 9am, and queueing for hours. Eliseo has had to extend the store’s trading hours and hire five extra staff members in the last fortnight to keep up with demand.
“That’s the first time that we’ve seen this sustained [an] uptick in demand,” Eliseo says.
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“It’s a bit of a gold rush … They’re reading about it on the news and they’re going, ‘Actually, I want some [gold].’”
Eliseo began managing the store a little more than three years ago, over which time gold prices doubled from US$1,700 to US$3,400 by April, before leaping nearly $1,000 higher in the last two months.
Some of his customers are selling their gold, but many are betting on sustained momentum and looking to buy at record highs.
ABC Bullion Sydney store manager Jordan Eliseo outside the store as people queue around the block waiting to buy gold. Photograph: Jessica Hromas/The Guardian
Sayed, a tradesman from Campbelltown, has already benefited from the gold price spike and is looking to buy another ounce – though he admits he has “no idea” whether the price will go up.
“Maybe it could jump again,” he says.
Analysts are increasingly siding with Sayed, pointing to continued political intervention in the US economy, unstable governments and conflicts around the world as reasons investors are still flocking to the traditional safe haven.
The Royal Bank of Canada singled out global uncertainty as the key driver for upgrading its forecast for gold prices to potentially hit US$5,000 (A$7,700) by early 2026.
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Investors are also trading out of uncertain investments in shares, as the prospect of an AI bubble hangs over sharemarkets’ record-breaking runs, and currencies, as persistent inflation and falling interest rates cut returns on cash.
That extends from investment funds, to central banks, to retail investors like Avtar, a nurse from Sydney’s northern suburbs who was queueing to add to his precious metal purchases on Tuesday.
Avtar took $78,000 out of his retirement savings in a term deposit with major bank ANZ and bought gold in April. That sum is now worth nearly $112,000.
But Avtar doesn’t believe those gains are sustainable, and instead queued to buy silver, which has seen even greater price rises than gold in 2025.
“Prices have gone scary,” he says. “If you invest now, will it crash, or will it still keep on growing?”
Overnight into Wednesday, the price of spot gold fell 5.5% to a one-week low of US$4,115.26 per ounce – its steepest fall since August 2020.
AMP’s chief economist, Shane Oliver, has been warning for two weeks that exploding queues could be a sign the market is becoming speculative and vulnerable to a correction.
Since then, as the queues continued to grow and the price kept soaring, but he has stood by that warning.
“The risk of a pullback is rising,” Oliver says.
– with Reuters