Gold is setting new record prices as expectations for interest rate cuts from the US Federal Reserve start to sink in.
The precious metal is up 22% year-to-date, making it one of the best performing major commodities so far in 2024.
Over the past 12 months it has rallied 32.8%, but more recently this has accelerated as rising political and economic uncertainty grips markets.
Some gold strategies however, have benefitted more than others from this rally.
Below are 12 major gold funds available for distribution in either Singapore or Hong Kong ranked by their return over the past twelve months*.
| Fund | YTD Return (%) | 1yr Return (%) | Fund Size ($m) | Fund Manager(s) |
| L&G Gold Mining UCITS ETF | 36.66 | 64.9 | 230.7 | |
| Schroder ISF Global Gold | 29.7 | 52.11 | 628.5 | James Luke |
| Edmond de Rothschild GoldSphere | 28.56 | 45.84 | 40.7 | Christophe Foliot, Thomas Ignaczak |
| VanEck Gold Miners ETF | 26.55 | 44.62 | 14791.6 | |
| iShares Gold Producers UCITS ETF | 26.37 | 43.43 | 1759.6 | |
| BlackRock GF World Gold | 28.01 | 41.87 | 4116.6 | Evy Hambro, Tom Holl |
| Franklin Gold and Precious Metals | 26.54 | 39.96 | 456.8 | Frederick Fromm, Stephen Land |
| Ninety One Global Gold | 20.3 | 35.72 | 476 | George Cheveley |
| DWS Noor Precious Metals Securities LC | 21.85 | 35.15 | 49.3 | Darwei Kung, Smith Taylor, Avi Feinberg |
| UOB United Gold & General | 14.08 | 30.82 | 83.2 | UOB Asset Management Limited |
| Jupiter Gold And Silver | 21.39 | 30.79 | 820.5 | Ned Naylor-Leyland |
| Invesco Gold & Special Minerals | 19.33 | 30.66 | 67.5 | Shanquan Li |
All of the funds above invest in a portfolio of gold mining stocks, which tend to be more volatile than the price of the bullion itself due to idiosyncratic factors related to each company.
Some mining companies may have more operational leverage or financial leverage, others have different management, mine productivity and geopolitical risks associated with them.
As such, the majority of the funds above have outpaced the gains of investing in gold bullion outright.
The best performing gold strategy in the list was the L&G Gold Mining UCITS ETF, which tracks the STOXX Global Gold Miners index.
This passive exchange-traded-fund (ETF) has benefitted from the concentration of its benchmark index, which holds just 34 mining names with large position sizes at the top.
The largest five constituents, for example, make up over half of the entire index. Newmont, the largest mining company globally by market capitalisation, accounts for 15.1% alone.
BlackRock has both an active and a passive ETF product available for distribution, both of which are closely matched in performance.
The actively managed $4.1bn BlackRock GF World Gold fund is ahead year-to-date, but behind over the past twelve months.
But the best performing active gold strategy was the $628m Schroder ISF Global Gold fund, managed by James Luke. Although it focuses on gold miners, it also holds silver miners too.
Although silver prices have rallied in unison with gold prices, they have slightly lagged the yellow metal which benefits from central bank buying and investment demand.
Due to silver’s use in solar panels, medicine and other industrial applications, it is moving towards being seen more as an industrial metal rather than an investment one.
This has meant that gold funds with large allocations to silver miners, such as Jupiter Gold And Silver, have not managed to outpace the gains of gold prices year-to-date.
*Returns were measured in US dollar terms. The data only includes funds available to Singapore and/or Hong Kong investors as classified by FE fundinfo. This is not an exhaustive list of all gold strategies.