Generally speaking, financial advisors recommend that investors diversify their investments and include 5 to 10% in physical gold, while wealthy individuals and other financial barons recommend reserving a much larger share, up to 30%: this is the case of billionaires Naguib Sawiris and Alex Karp.

For Naguib Sawiris, gold is a protection against the risks of a market collapse

Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris is CEO of the holding company Orascom (Telecom Media and Technology). His strategy is to allocate almost 30% of his asset portfolio to gold.

According to him, gold is a safe haven, but also a counter-cyclical asset that acts as a shock absorber in a diversified portfolio: when stock markets fall, the price of gold rises. To support his strategy, Naguib Sawiris recalls that during the bursting of the internet bubble in the early 2000s or the 2008 subprime crisis, gold never deviated from its protective function.

For Alex Karp, gold is a protection against black swans

Alex Karp is one of the three founders of the American company Palantir, which specialises in Big Data and mass data analysis. The billionaire's strategy is to anticipate a new "black swan" crisis.

A black swan is an absolutely improbable event, or at least one that is out of the ordinary, but which could have been foreseen once it had passed; this kind of crisis is not only economic, a black swan can also be a natural disaster, a pandemic, a stock market crash, a social crisis, etc.

To counter the disastrous effects on its assets, the tech giant bought huge amounts of physical gold, around 60 million dollars in bars, which it could dispose of in a very short time in the event of cataclysmic events. For him, holding a high proportion of physical gold is a way of protecting himself against all kinds of crises.

 

Faced with an economy that could collapse at any time and the uncertainties of the future, investors fear a devaluation of all their other assets and are positioning themselves to buy gold: global demand for ingots and coins rose sharply (+36%) in the first quarter of 2021, in a strategy consistent with that of our two billionaires.