We recently had the opportunity to sit down with David Lin, host of The David Lin Report, for a candid conversation about where gold stands right now — and more importantly, where it’s headed.
You can watch the full interview here:
If you’re not familiar with David, he’s one of the most respected independent financial journalists working today. Before launching his own platform in 2023, he spent years at Kitco News as an anchor and producer, covering precious metals, commodities, and global markets. His background in macroeconomics research — he studied finance at McGill University and worked at BCA Research before entering media — gives him a depth that most financial interviewers simply don’t have. He asks hard questions and he expects real answers.
Our Senior Director Morgan Steckler joined him on March 23rd, the same day gold briefly touched below $4,300 an ounce — one of the sharpest single-period pullbacks the market has seen in years.
The conversation that followed covered a lot of ground: what’s driving the selloff, what our clients are actually doing in response, and why the structural case for holding physical gold and silver hasn’t changed one bit.
Below, we’ve pulled out the key themes and why we think they matter for anyone thinking seriously about shielding their wealth.
The Selloff Is Real — But the Reasons Behind It Matter
The first thing Morgan addressed was the obvious question: why is gold selling off so sharply?
The short answer is that several forces hit at once. A stronger US dollar is putting pressure on gold prices. Treasury yields jumped after the Fed held rates steady. And after gold’s historic run over the past year, large institutional funds are locking in profits — that’s simply what institutions do after a big move.
On top of that, oil price spikes and equity volatility are triggering margin calls at hedge funds, and gold is one of the easiest assets to liquidate quickly. None of that is a reflection of gold’s fundamentals. It’s a reflection of short-term liquidity needs.
“This is probably mechanical selling,” Morgan told David. “It’s not a change in the long-term conviction behind what the metals represent.”
We think that’s exactly the right framing. Price action and fundamentals can diverge significantly in the short term — and right now, the fundamentals remain as strong as we’ve seen them.
What Our Clients Are Actually Doing
David asked Morgan directly: are clients selling or buying right now?
The answer might surprise you. We’re seeing more buying activity than we have in recent memory. Not panic buying — purposeful buying. The kind of buying that comes from people who have thought carefully about their financial position and see a dip as an opportunity to add to a long-term allocation, not a reason to exit one.
The clients reaching out to us right now are largely people who have spent decades building wealth and are now in or approaching retirement. They’ve watched the national debt triple since 2008. They’ve felt inflation erode their purchasing power in ways that don’t show up cleanly in any single statistic. They’re not interested in trading gold. They want to own it — and own it for years.
“People are buying for preservation,” Morgan said. “People are buying as a defense, a long-term legacy.”
That’s the orientation of our client base, and frankly it’s the orientation we think makes the most sense given where we are in this economic cycle.
The Dollar Problem Isn’t Going Away
One of the most important points Morgan raised — and one that often gets lost in the noise around gold’s short-term price moves — is purchasing power.
Since the US left the gold standard in 1971, the dollar has steadily lost purchasing power relative to hard assets. Since that same year, gold is up roughly 12,000%. The S&P 500 is up approximately 7,000%. That’s not a case against stocks — it’s a case for thinking more carefully about what “return” actually means when your measuring stick is itself losing value.
Ray Dalio has made a similar argument for years, recommending roughly 15% gold allocation in a well-diversified portfolio specifically because gold tends to hold up when the rest of a typical portfolio is struggling. Morgan noted that Dalio’s own fund has moved well beyond that level — which tells you something about how seriously some of the world’s most sophisticated investors are taking this.
The risk for retirement investors isn’t just volatility. It’s the slow, persistent erosion of what their savings can actually buy. Gold is one of the few assets with a long track record of holding its ground against that erosion.
There’s a Supply Story Most People Aren’t Watching
While the financial press focuses on spot prices, we’re watching something else closely: physical supply.
The US Mint suspended gold and silver sales at multiple points in 2026. Depositories and refineries are backed up with significant delays. Mining output is falling short of projections. And central banks — particularly those in BRICS-aligned nations like Russia, China, India, Brazil, and South Africa — have been buying physical gold in metric-ton quantities, steadily pulling available supply off the market.
As Morgan put it: an ounce will always remain an ounce. The price in dollars fluctuates. The physical reality of what you own does not.
When sovereign wealth funds and central banks are competing for the same finite pool of physical metal that our clients are trying to access, that’s a supply dynamic worth paying attention to — regardless of what the spot price does on any given week.
Gold Is a Long-Term Position, Not a Short-Term Trade
This is something we say to every client, and it came through clearly in the conversation with David Lin.
Gold is not a momentum trade. It’s not something you flip in and out of based on quarterly performance. The investors who have gotten the most out of it are those who committed to a position and held it through the noise — through dips like the one we’re seeing right now, through periods when equities were outperforming, through all of it.
“This is not a day trading stock,” Morgan told David. “This is not a call or put or options or even crypto. This is an asset you hold for a different reason entirely.”
Our clients who are most at peace with their allocation are those who made the decision with a three-to-five-year horizon in mind and haven’t looked back. The current pullback hasn’t shaken them. If anything, it’s confirmed why they made the move in the first place.
Why Physical Ownership Still Matters
David raised a theme that comes up more and more in our own conversations with clients: what does it actually mean to own something in a world where almost every financial asset exists only as a digital entry?
Most retirement savings today sit inside digital systems — brokerage accounts, IRA custodians, online dashboards. That’s convenient. But it also means your wealth is only as accessible as those platforms allow it to be. System outages happen. Policy changes happen. Access restrictions happen. For most assets, you don’t own the thing — you own a claim on the thing.
Physical gold and silver are different. When held properly within a compliant retirement structure, they are allocated to you specifically. They are audited, insured, and yours. They don’t disappear in a system outage. They can’t be repriced by a central bank decision. For a growing number of our clients, that tangibility is not a minor detail — it’s the whole point.
How to Add Physical Gold or Silver to Your IRA or 401(k)
If this conversation has you thinking about your own retirement allocation, here’s the practical reality of how it works.
Moving a portion of an existing IRA or 401(k) into physical precious metals is a straightforward process when you have the right guidance. At Priority Gold, we handle the entire rollover for you. It’s tax-free when executed correctly, typically takes three to five business days, and results in physical gold or silver held in your name at an audited, insured depository — backed by a minimum $4 million Lloyd’s of London insurance policy.
You keep full control. You can liquidate whenever you choose, take required minimum distributions in physical form if you prefer, or arrange for delivery to a private vault. We don’t hold your metals — the relationship is between you and the depository, and your assets are yours.
The key word, as Morgan emphasized to David, is portion. We’re not suggesting you move everything. We’re suggesting you consider whether a meaningful slice of what you’ve worked to build belongs somewhere outside the digital financial system — somewhere tangible, insured, and immune to the pressures that are currently rattling paper assets.
The Bottom Line
Gold’s pullback in early 2026 is real. But it doesn’t change the underlying story.
The debt levels are still where they are. The dollar is still losing ground. Physical supply is still tightening. Central banks are still buying. And the clients calling us right now are still buying — because they understand that what they’re trying to protect their wealth from hasn’t changed just because the spot price has moved.
If you watch the full conversation between Morgan and David Lin, that’s the thread running through all of it. Not alarm. Not predictions. Just a clear-eyed look at where we are — and a straightforward case for making sure some of what you’ve built is protected from what’s coming.
If you’d like to talk through what that looks like for your specific situation, we’re here.
Watch the Full Interview
The full conversation between Morgan Steckler and David Lin covers:
- What’s actually driving gold’s 2026 pullback
- Why our clients are buying more, not less
- The purchasing power risk most retirement investors overlook
- Physical supply constraints and what they mean long-term
- How to move a portion of your IRA or 401(k) into physical metals
