Chris Wood sees gold prices at $6,600 in a secular bull market; here's why

Gold prices have been on a tear in the last few months, rising nearly 43 per cent thus far in calendar year 2025 (CY25). The rise, analysts said, has been on account of ‘safe haven’ buying by investors amid geopolitical issues, Trump tariffs and buying by global central banks.

 

Despite the strong run thus far in CY25, Christopher Wood, global head of equity strategy at Jefferies sees more headroom in the months ahead and expects gold prices to hit $6,600 an ounce (oz) mark, up over 76 per cent from the current levels of $3,745/oz. 

 

Back in December 2002, Wood had forecast gold prices to hit $3,400/oz The target, Wood said, was calculated by adjusting the 1980 peak gold price of $850/oz by the then 6.3 per cent annualised growth in US total personal income since January 1980. “That gave a gold price target of $3,437/oz,” Wood said. 

 

 

The target was subsequently raised to $3,700/oz at the beginning of January 2005 as a consequence of updating the growth in personal income.

 

In September 2007, Wood fine-tuned the methodology by using the growth in US disposable personal income per capita since January 1980 instead of total personal income. The target has since been updated, as a consequence of the growth in disposable income per capita, to $4,200/oz in March 2016 and to $5,500/oz in August 2020.

 

At the peak of the last secular bull market in gold in January 1980, Wood said, gold price was then equivalent to 9.9 per cent of US disposable income per capita which stood at $8,551. 

 

“The current gold price is 5.6 per cent of US disposable income per capita of $66,100. To reach 9.9 per cent of US disposable income per capita means gold should rise to $6,571. This means that a price of $6,600/oz is now a reasonable target for gold at the peak of the current secular bull market,” Wood wrote in his weekly note to investors, GREED & fear. 

 

 

As a strategy, Wood maintains a 40 per cent weight in gold bullion in the global portfolio for a US dollar-denominated pension fund first set up at the end of third quarter of calendar year 2002. 

 

“That 40 per cent weighting has been a minimum allocation to gold bullion ever since. Gold was reduced from 50 per cent in December 2020 when GREED & fear first allocated an investment in Bitcoin in the same portfolio,” Wood wrote.

 

On the charts

 

Global central banks, Julius Baer believes, may remain the scriptwriters of the current trend in gold prices, but the stage is increasingly outside the US. Investors, they said in a recent note, willing to look beyond the Fed will find a richer set of opportunities: in GBP resilience, in Asian semiconductors and online leaders, and in the time-tested protection of gold and, by extension, its miners.

 

In the short-to medium term, gold, they said, could reach target levels of $4,500 to $4,800, technical chart patterns suggest. "Similarly, silver appears poised for further gains, with potential upside targets at $52 to $58," wrote Mensur Pocinci, an analyst tracking precious metals at Julius Baer in a recent note.