This Is Why People Are So in Love With Gold

Tracy Alloway (0:00)

Hey there, Odd Lots listeners, it's Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:03)

And Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:04)

We are very excited to announce that Odd Lots is going to Washington.

Joe Weisenthal (0:09)

That's right, for the first time, we are going to do a live public Odd Lots recording in our nation's capital. That's gonna be March 12th in Washington, DC at the Miracle Theater. And guests will be announced in the coming days, but in the meantime, you can find a ticket link at bloomberg.com/oddlots.

SPEAKER_3 (0:32)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

Joe Weisenthal (0:48)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:53)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:54)

Tracy, gold has had a really good year. Here's a question.

Tracy Alloway (0:58)

Here's a question. One of the last times we talked about gold, you made fun of me for being a gold bug. Are you gonna start this episode out by doing the same thing?

Joe Weisenthal (1:08)

No, you're completely vindicated. Gold has done really well over the long term, over the last several years. It's been one of the best performing assets. It's stable. I take back everything I ever implied negatively about gold.

Tracy Alloway (1:21)

You're gonna be nice to the gold bugs now?

Joe Weisenthal (1:23)

Yeah.

Tracy Alloway (1:23)

All right.

Joe Weisenthal (1:24)

I'm not capitulating, but look at the charts. Great.

Tracy Alloway (1:27)

I will say I'm sort of an accidental gold bug. It has not been a conscious choice to accumulate, but it has turned out really well. So gold keeps hitting record after record. As we're recording this, I think it's at 2,600 an ounce.

Joe Weisenthal (1:42)

Yeah, 2649 It had gotten as high as 2,800 almost in October, but it's been, I mean, it's the last couple of years, but phenomenal.

Tracy Alloway (1:48)

That's crazy. And the other really interesting thing is like, it started going up even as the Federal Reserve was raising rates, which is something that you don't normally see. Like normally gold has that inverse relationship to rates, that negative correlation. And I guess the demand has just been so strong that it doesn't really matter this time around.

Joe Weisenthal (2:09)

Can I say something? So you bring up the sort of Fed connection, et cetera. And so I want to learn more about gold, but I don't really have much interest in just talking to like another gold macro guy, because I don't know what they say. They always tell the same story. It's like inflation and currency debasement and all that. Maybe that's all true. But I sort of like I want to talk gold, but I just like I sort of felt going into this conversation that we can't just talk to someone who's just, you know, going to tell the same story they could have told about gold every single day for the last 20 years.

Tracy Alloway (2:43)

I think it's a very valid feeling to have. There is something like physical about gold, obviously, it's shiny. It's fun to hold. Even like silver, you can have fun stacking those coins, as I know personally. So it makes sense to talk to someone who's in the physical market.

Joe Weisenthal (2:58)

We're going to talk about what's going on in the gold market, but actually get into why people love gold so much and why people want to be covered in gold. Why right now, why people want to accumulate gold, have it in their saves, have it on their personal, et cetera. We really do have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Maksud Agadjani, Max Agadjani. He is the founder of TraxNYC, New York City based jewelry dealer. And listeners might know, we actually had him on the podcast once in early 2020, and listeners might know him if they ever saw the movie Uncut Gems, one of my favorite movies of the last few years, because he actually was in the movie. He played, I guess, kind of himself, to some extent in the movie. I think the character's name was Yussie, in the Diamond District, in the Gold District, in Manhattan. And we're going to talk all these gold with Maksud aka Yussie. Thank you so much for coming back on Odd Lots.

Maksud Agadjani (3:55)

Thank you for having me for a second time.

Joe Weisenthal (3:57)

What's your life been like the last four years? How did that all change your life?

Maksud Agadjani (4:01)

Um, the Odd Lots, how did that change my life? It's only been up from there, I got to be honest.

Joe Weisenthal (4:07)

And that little movie that you appeared in at the end of 2016