Gold Just Had Its Worst Quarter Since 2013. A Record Share of Central Banks Say They're Buying Anyway.

Gold just had its worst quarter in thirteen years.

Down 14.1% since April. Down sharply from January’s all-time high near $5,595. Closing out Q2 2026 below $4,000 for the first time in months. If you’ve been stacking and you’re looking at your stack right now, you’re probably doing the math and it’s uncomfortable.

Here’s the other number: 45.

That’s the percentage of central banks — surveyed by the World Gold Council across 76 institutions globally — that plan to add to their own gold reserves over the next 12 months. It’s a record, the highest reading since the survey started in 2018. A further 89% expect global central bank gold holdings to rise. The central banks aren’t panicking. They’re planning to buy more.

What Happened This Quarter

The story is straightforward. Markets spent all of 2025 pricing in Federal Reserve rate cuts. That expectation drove gold to its January record. When the Iran conflict threatened the Strait of Hormuz, it piled on a geopolitical premium. Silver rode the same wave to $121.64 on January 29.

Then the pivot came. US-Iran peace talks advanced. Energy prices calmed. Kevin Warsh stepped into the Fed Chair role, and his first meeting in June left rates unchanged at 3.50%–3.75% while the dot plot delivered the real message: nine of eighteen FOMC participants now pencil in at least one hike this year, and all but one see rates flat or higher by December. The committee stripped its easing language out of the statement entirely.

Gold repriced immediately. A non-yielding asset in a rising-rate environment is less attractive to paper traders. They rotated out. Hence the worst quarterly decline since Q2 2013, when gold fell 22.7%.

None of this is complicated. The same mechanism that lifted gold when rate-cut expectations peaked is now working in reverse.

The Part That Doesn’t Move

Central banks don’t trade quarterly. They set policy in multi-year cycles, and their reasons for buying gold have nothing to do with Warsh’s press conference.

Those reasons: de-dollarization, currency diversification, a multi-decade shift in which countries want to hold fewer US Treasury bonds. None of that changed in Q2. Gold ended last year at 27% of global central bank reserves — up from 20% a year earlier — while the Treasury share fell to 22%. That was enough to make gold the world’s largest reserve asset for the first time since 1996. When your reserve currency is someone else’s geopolitical tool, gold starts looking like the only genuinely neutral place to sit.

The volatility is real. The longer-term trajectory hasn’t been broken.

What This Means for Stackers

The uncomfortable truth about stacking is that the moments when it feels worst are often when it’s most important to stay consistent.

Q2 2026 was a gut punch. If you were buying gold near the highs in January, you’re sitting on a serious paper loss. That hurts. But you’re not a paper trader — you’re accumulating a physical asset with a long track record as a store of value, backed by the same structural demand from sovereign buyers that just made gold the biggest reserve asset on earth.

The paper market cleared out the rate-cut speculators. What’s left is the structural bid from institutions that think in decades.

Don’t change your plan because a Fed chair gave a hawkish speech. The central banks didn’t.