These Two Things Make Up 82% of my Retirement Account

Financial planners might faint when they hear this…

Time to get truly personal.

For many a year now, I’ve written many a dispatch, and I’ve filmed many a video with my managing editor, Ben Murnane, in which I make note of the fact that my largest retirement account—a mid- to high-six-figure rollover IRA that I self-manage in Switzerland—primarily holds Swiss francs and exposure to gold.

As I’ve noted, this is not inconsequential exposure.

It’s not a modicum of exposure.

It’s not an exposure that follows financial planners’ recommended guidelines of, maybe, 5% in gold, and a couple of percentage points in currencies.

Not even remotely close to that prescription.

I recently asked the Swiss firm I use to send me my updated portfolio so that I might take a gander at updated balances and whatnot.

My exposure to gold and francs in that account as of mid-January is… nearly 82%. (By the way, Southern Copper, the world’s largest copper miner, makes up another 9% of the portfolio, meaning Swiss francs and metals represent $9 of every $10 of wealth in that portfolio.)

Like I said, not even close to what financial pros would recommend.

Actually, I will assume any financial pros who might be reading today’s dispatch now have a mess to clean up because their brain just exploded all over the carpet.

But here’s where I really aim to go in today’s dispatch: My returns in that portfolio since 2021.

It was back then, during the height of the COVID crisis that I made the decision to dump the vast majority of stocks I owned in that account, and to plow all the proceeds into Swiss francs and gold. (I own a physical gold ETF called “abrdn Physical Gold Shares” and I own Barrick Mining, one of the world’s largest gold miners.)

I made that call for a few reasons:

1. I saw inflation was going to be a problem despite the Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s promise that higher prices were going to prove “transitory.”
2. I saw the US was taking on vast sums of debt and doing so at an increasingly fast pace.
3. I saw that US debt repayments were going to grow into something that the world would find troubling.
4. I saw that the US dollar was destined for lower prices because of worries about US debt and debt repayments.
5. I saw that gold was going to see much higher prices because of inflation, because of crappy US debt management, and because the dollar would be losing ground over time.
6. And I saw that the Swiss franc, as the world’s OG safe-haven currency, was going to see higher highs as more and more money fled the dollar and went looking for a safer harbor to hide out.

That is precisely where we’ve ended up five years later.

So, let me share my returns by way of two screen grabs from a portion of my portfolio report:

What to pay attention to:

In chart 1, look at the performance.

Some mediocre years, and then a blowout in 2025.

In chart 2, look at the first two columns: Time Period and Performance p.a. (per annum).

One year, up nearly 44%. Three years, up more than 16% per year. Five years, up roughly 7.7% per year.

The three- and five-year returns trail the S&P. But that gets to another point—a comment I’ve made regularly since 2021: I truly do not care about chasing the S&P 500.

I turn 60 next week.

I’ve lived through every crisis, crash, and panic on Wall Street since 1984, when I snapped up my first shares of stock (Tiger Express, long ago digested into what is today’s FedEx).

When I was young, I didn’t worry about those moments; plenty of time to recoup paper losses.

Now, however, as retirement sneaks up on me like an elephant trying to sneak up on a mouse, I care more about preserving the wealth I’ve built. I care nothing about notching every possible percentage point of gain in the stock market.

Moreover, my returns since 2021 match exactly what I was expecting, and which I’ve mentioned many times in my musings over the years: Mediocre/acceptable performance most years that effectively keeps my wealth safe… and then a race higher as the world comes to grip with the risks inherent in the US fiscal situation that, then, spill over into perceptions of the dollar.

We’re watching the world grip very hard right now—in real time.

The dollar is a deeply troubled currency.

Partly that’s a function of way too much debt on Uncle Sam’s shoulders. Part of it is bad policy from the White House. Tariffs are a demonstrable drag on the US economy. They’ve given America an anemic jobs market and collapsing consumer confidence, as well as a rising number of personal and corporate bankruptcies, among other failings.

On top of that, we have black swan events including illogical high tariff levies on the world as a whole. The US government is alienating foe and friend alike. The invasion of Venezuela is raising the specter of an America that is suddenly the world’s schoolyard bully… and the very real worries now that America could decide to unilaterally usurp an allied country’s territory (Greenland), which would have massively bad impacts on America both imaginable and unimaginable.

If those weren’t looney enough, the Department of Justice just this month launched a criminal investigation into the current Fed Chair Powell on questionably accurate accusations that he lied to Congress about the costs of rehabbing the Federal Reserve building, which hasn’t seen a facelift since it opened nearly 100 years ago.

Global investors are rightly worried that the DoJ’s ill-advised pursuit threatens the end of Fed independence, which is supremely critical to global perceptions of the dollar as a stable currency. And it gives rise to the very real likelihood that the next Fed chair will act in the best interest of Donald Trump’s economic desires rather than base interest rate decisions on economic data—a reality Trump has acknowledged as a prerequisite for landing the job in the first place.

Global investors, thus, are rightly worried about the US morphing into a rogue state with a currency that’s managed according to White House whims.

That’s a world in which the sun shines brightly on Swiss francs and gold.

As such, I remain quite content with my vast overexposure to metals and the Swissie, as the franc is called in currency circles.

At some point, I will scale back my exposure

That day, however, is nowhere near.

We’ll reassess in a year… or three.

Until then, onward and upward for francs and gold. Both are destined to hit a string of new highs over the coming years.

And if anything truly looney happens with Greenland… all bets are off. Gold and Swissie rocket higher.