Gold is back. Not that it ever really left, but it’s suddenly loud again.

For a decade, the tech world tried to kill it. We were told that "digital gold"—the kind you mine with GPUs and a staggering amount of electricity—was the new safe haven. But as it turns out, when the world starts looking like a slow-motion car crash, people stop caring about decentralized ledgers and start caring about heavy, shiny blocks they can actually drop on their toes.

Gold recently crested $2,400 an ounce. That’s not just a number; it’s a fever pitch. If you bought in when the world was merely "concerning" back in 2018, you’re sitting on a gain that makes most blue-chip stocks look like a bad joke. But now comes the part that keeps everyone up at 3:00 AM: the exit strategy. Or the lack thereof.

Selling now feels like betting against the apocalypse, and in 2024, that’s a risky short. Staying in feels like being the last person at a party where the cops are already pulling into the driveway.

The friction is everywhere. You’ve got central banks, specifically in China and Turkey, vacuuming up bullion like they know something we don’t. They’re de-dollarizing. They’re bracing for a hard landing that the Fed keeps insisting won’t happen. On the other side, you have the retail crowd buying gold bars at Costco next to 40-packs of toilet paper. When the "refined" investment strategy of the global elite starts mirroring the impulse buys of a suburban dad, the alarm bells should be ringing.

It’s the ultimate trade-off. If you sell now, you lock in a massive profit. You take the win. But what do you do with that cash? You put it back into a banking system that feels increasingly like a house of cards, or into a stock market that’s being propped up by five AI companies and a prayer. If you stay invested, you’re betting that the current geopolitical dumpster fire—the trade wars, the actual wars, the looming elections—will only get hotter.

The "experts" are predictably useless. One camp says we’re headed for $3,000 because of the interest rate pivot. They argue that once the Fed finally blinks and cuts rates, the dollar will slide and gold will moon. The other camp says we’ve reached peak paranoia. They’ll tell you that gold doesn't pay a dividend, it’s expensive to store, and it’s a "pet rock" that only gains value when people are terrified.

They’re both right. That’s the problem.

Let’s talk about the specific friction of the "Costco Effect." When a warehouse club sells $100 million worth of gold in a single quarter, you aren't looking at a stable market. You’re looking at a momentum play driven by pure, unadulterated FOMO. History isn't kind to people who buy the top of a parabolic curve. Yet, every time the price dips five percent, a new headline about a central bank purchase sends it screaming back up.

There’s a certain irony in writing this for a tech audience. We spent years mocking the "gold bugs" who spent their weekends prepping for the collapse of fiat currency. We called them luddites. We said they didn't understand the future. But look at the scoreboard. While NFTs are currently worth less than the pixels they’re printed on and various "stablecoins" have evaporated into the ether, the luddites are up 20% on the year.

The question of whether to sell or stay isn't really about the price of gold at all. It’s a personality test. It’s a measurement of how much faith you have left in the institutions that manage our reality. If you think the adults are back in the room and the economy is on a path to a "soft landing," you should sell every gram you own and go buy a tech ETF. You’ll make a killing on the way down.

But if you look at the debt clock, the shipping lanes in the Red Sea, and the general vibe of the global political stage and feel a cold shiver, you probably aren't going to sell. You’ll keep holding that bar of metal, feeling its weight, and hoping you never actually have to use it to buy a loaf of bread.

It’s a weird way to live, waiting for the world to break just so your portfolio stays green. But then again, look around.

Does it look like things are getting any less broken?