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Precious metal investing has always been an interesting ride. For years, metals enthusiasts are often confined to the corners of social media and online discourse. “Gold bugs” and other precious metal investors seem to be obsessive, even when metals drastically underperform year after year.
Well, as January 2026 nears a close, precious metals are definitely not underperforming. In fact, they’ve been one of the hottest investments over the past year and especially in recent weeks and months. As of writing, gold is trading at $5335/oz, up 95% over the last twelve months. Silver trades at $113/oz, up a scorching 268% over the last twelve months or you know, a simple 140% in just the last three months!
We’ve heard that bitcoin is the new gold in recent years. Well, in 2026, it seems like gold is the new bitcoin!
The challenge of course with precious metal investing is how do you want to own it? Do you want a safe full of physical gold and silver coins? This involves risk of loss and theft. The 21st century has brought a number of ETF-like mechanisms where you can “buy” gold and silver and other metals similar to buying shares of a company. This has made getting exposure to the metals a lot simpler.
But now with prediction markets, you can get exposure even easier and in new ways. Economic prediction markets and financial prediction markets are not new things (even if the political driven prediction markets such as the presidential election get all the headlines). But with the recent performance of gold and silver, these markets have gained in popularity.
Let’s take a look at some of the options available for users.
Polymarket is currently offering users a series of “What will gold hit by end of (insert month)?” markets where users can bet on the price of gold at the end of January, February, and other months as well. Each of these markets provide different levels you can bet on. For example, on the February option, you can find markets for different thresholds such as $5500, $5800, $6000 and more. Each market has a Yes or No option you can select and wager real money.
Similar options are available for silver at Polymarket.
Over on Kalshi, they don’t currently have specific price levels for gold and silver in the same way as Polymarket, but they do have a market available for whether bitcoin will outperform gold this year.
Other interesting financial markets on Kalshi right now include:
Additionally, a wide range of economic markets are available around CPI, gas prices, GDP growth, mortgage rates and Fed decisions.
Because of the variety of markets available (and more coming every week it seems!), you could even combine exposure around some interesting economic + political realities. Think home affordability will have an impact on midterm elections? Well, you can check out the 30 year mortgage rate markets combined with 2026 midterms results.
What an interesting time!
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