Member Spotlight

Please tell us about the World Gold Council.

The World Gold Council is a market development association for the gold industry. Our membership consists of leading gold mining firms from across the globe. We’re known for delivering high quality research and analytics and aim to be the global authority on the gold market.

In addition to working with investors to deliver gold’s relevance as a strategic asset, we also focus on gold’s social and environment impacts. In terms of the latter, we’re proud to have worked closely with our members to develop the Responsible Gold Mining Principles, a framework that sets out clear expectations for consumers, investors and the downstream gold supply chain as to what constitutes responsible gold mining. There are 51 individual Principles covering all aspects of E, S and G and conformance must be assured by a third party and publicly disclosed.

How will your engagement with Spark contribute to World Gold Council objectives?

The World Gold Council’s ultimate mission is to deepen understanding among institutional investors gold’s potential role in their portfolio as a safe haven, diversifier and a source of returns. After building momentum within the defined benefit community, we are seeking to dive deeper into the extremely vital DC space.

Being part of SPARK is a unique opportunity to work with leading experts in defined contributions to enhance our knowledge of the evolving considerations impacting plan participants and providers and refine how gold can be most impactful in this context.

What are some key trends you’re seeing for gold in 2021?

Gold was one of the best performing major assets of 2020 driven by a combination of: high risk, low interest rates and positive price momentum. It also had one of the lowest drawdowns during the year.

Looking ahead, we believe that investors will likely see the low interest rate environment as an opportunity to add risk assets as they look towards economic recovery on the near horizon. That said, investors will simultaneously be facing continuing challenges including ballooning budget deficits, inflationary pressures and market corrections amid already high equity valuations. We view these dynamics, combined with nascent economic recovery, especially in emerging markets, to be supportive for gold in 2021.

For those interested in seeing how gold may perform under key macroeconomic scenarios, we developed Qaurum℠, a web-based tool underpinned by our proprietary gold valuation methodology. It is available, along with a wide range of gold related data, insights, and analytics on Goldhub.com.