My biggest investment mistake this millennium – its terrifying warning | Personal Finance | Finance

My first big error was skipping my company pension scheme when I started work in 1988. Fresh out of uni and full of left-wing zeal, I dismissed pensions as a capitalist plot. In any case, I assumed I’d have moved onwards and upwards within a year or two.

Oh dear.

I stayed for a decade and only joined the scheme near the end. Early contributions matter most, with decades to grow. I’ve been playing catch-up ever since.

Then, in 2000, I bought a personal pension with Equitable Life – just before it collapsed. At least I got my money back, unlike some.

That same year, I bought the booming Aberdeen Technology fund at the height of the dot-com bubble. Two months later, the bubble burst. I lost almost everything.

I learned from my mistakes.

I’ve only made one huge error since, although arguably, it was the costliest of the lot

As in investment journalist, I was commissioned to write about new-fangled crypto-currency Bitcoin in 2014.

I briefly thought about buying some, but it all seemed a bit odd and technical. If I’d pressed on, I wouldn’t be writing this today.

I’d be on a beach. On my own island.

But we’ve all got our “one that got away”. There’s one, though, that really gets me – because I’ve dismissed it over and over again.

My single biggest mistake was shunning gold.

Once mocked as a “barbarous relic”, it’s the asset class of the millennium, and a barometer for the chaos of our times.

For more than 4,000 years, humans have turned to gold to protect their wealth. Roman soldiers, Chinese peasants, hated dictators – all hoarded it as a last resort.

And nothing has changed.

Gold thrives in troubled times, so it’s shone in recent years. The 2008 financial crisis, 2011 eurozone crunch, the pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and now the Israel-Iran war fuelled the 21st Century gold rush.

The weird thing? Gold has barely any practical use. It doesn’t power anything, it doesn’t feed anyone, it’s barely used in industry.

These days most buyers never even touch it. They buy online, it’s held in vaults. That’s no use if society collapses.

But none of that has stopped its rise.

On December 31, 1999, gold closed at around $288 (£212) an ounce. Today, it trades at $3,329 – a staggering 1,056% increase. A £10,000 investment would now be worth £115,600.

And I’ve never owned so much as a gram.

This wasn’t an oversight. I deliberately ruled gold out. I told myself it was outdated, too volatile, and didn’t pay a yield like shares or bonds. I pointed to how it spiked in 1979 during the Iran revolution and Russian invasion of Afghanistan, then stagnated for 20 years.

The 1980s and 1990s were good times, relatively.

Since 2000, the world has lurched from crisis to crisis. And gold has become the go-to safe haven once again.

Investors should still tread carefully. If global peace breaks out, the gold price will crash.

Either way, I’ve missed the boat. But that’s not the real story here.

The real story is what gold’s rise tells us, that the world is becoming a more dangerous and unstable place.

And the terrifying part is… it may just be getting started.