by Ronan Manly, BullionStar:
Gallup, the Washington DC analytics and surveying firm, recently released the findings of its annual ‘Economy And Personal Finance’ survey which asks the US public the simple question “Which investment asset class do you think is the best long-term investment?“.
And the results of the 2023 survey are extremely encouraging for gold, with 26% of survey respondents saying that they perceive gold to be the best long-term investment.
This 26% score for gold in 2023 is nearly double the 15% of respondents who opted for gold as the best long-term investment in the 2022 survey, and reinforces evidence seen elsewhere that there is an ongoing massive shift in gold’s favor among the US public right now.
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Not only that, but the percentage of Americans opting for gold as the best long-term investment was also the highest result for gold in the annual poll since 2012, when 28% of the US public opted for gold. This means that the percentage of the US public who think gold is the best long-term investment is now at its highest for 11 years.
Not surprisingly, this shift to gold is occuring in a US economy which has experienced multi-year high inflation, heightened stock market volatility, multiple large bank failures such as Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, and a general sense of heighted geo-political and financial market risk.
The Background
Each year, Gallup News Service conducts an “Economy And Personal Finance” poll within its Gallup Poll Social Series which asks the question:
“Which of the following do you think is the best long-term investment: bonds, real estate, savings accounts or CDs, stocks or mutual funds, or gold?”
The survey is conducted on a random sample of just over 1,000 adults (18 years +), living in all 50 US states and the District of Columbia, via telephone interviewing over landlines and cellphones, with the results weighted by national demographics.
The sequence of the five asset classes listed are rotated when the actual question is asked to respondents, so as to remove potential bias of one asset being mentioned in the question before another.
For many years up until 2010, this annual Gallop survey only included the four asset classes of real estate, bonds, savings accounts / CDs, and stocks / mutual funds, but in 2011 for the first time Gallop added ‘Gold’ as an asset class, which means that for the last 13 years, gold has been one of the five asset classes in the survey.
Additionally, last year in 2022, Gallup added a sixth asset class, namely cryptocurrency, to the survey, but decided to still keep the five asset classes as one version of the question, while making the ‘six asset classes’ another version, which means that for the last 2 years, the poll has two alternative questions:
Version A – “Which of the following do you think is the best long-term investment: bonds, real estate, savings accounts or CDs, stocks or mutual funds, or gold?”
Version B – “Which of the following do you think is the best long-term investment: bonds, real estate, savings accounts or CDs, stocks or mutual funds, gold, or cryptocurrency?”
Given 2 different questions, Gallup handles this by splitting the sample of respondents into two, and asking approximately half the people Version A of the question, while asking the remainder of the people Version B of the question.
This year in 2023, the random sample consisted of 1013 adults, with 500 people asked the question about five asset classes, and the remaining 513 people asked the question about six asset classes. A partner company of Gallup called Dynata, which is a customer data supplier company, provided the respondent contact data that Gallup then polled.
Importantly, this 2023 Gallup survey took place between April 3 and April 25, 2023, so it is extremely recent. The full survey results can be seen in pdf form here.
Gallup says that these sample sizes have a “margin of sampling error is ±5 percentage points at the 95% confidence level”, which basically means that there is a 95% level of confidence that the reported percentages (of preferences for different long-term investments) from the sample of US adults are within ±5 percentage points of the true percentages of preferences in the entire US population.
The Findings
Overall, the 2023 Gallup poll found that 34% of Americans think that real estate is the best long-term investment, followed by 26% of Americans who think that gold is the best long-term investment.
In third place came stocks / mutual funds, which only 18% of the US public right now consider the best long-term investment, and in fourth place came savings accounts / certificates of deposit (CDs) with 13% of respondents opting for this asset class as the best long-term investment. Note that CDs are time deposits. Rounding out the results was bonds, with only 7% of respondents thinking that bonds are currently the best long-term investment.
Given that any poll / survey uses a sample and comes up with an estimate, all polls, including this one, are subject to sampling variability. And remembering the sampling error of ±5 percentage points in the sample sizes of 500 people (as stated by Gallup), the results can be interpreted as follows:
