Dear Crisis Investing Subscribers,
We've got another winner that's doubled. If you're a regular reader, you probably know what comes next: it's time to take our Casey Free Ride and let the rest run for free.
But before we get into the details, I have good news to share: Gold seems to finally be going mainstream.
The “barbarous relic,” as British economist and intellectual architect of today’s debt-and-deficit regime John Maynard Keynes once called gold, is finally getting the attention of Wall Street. Global financial giants are falling over each other with increasingly bullish forecasts. JP Morgan just raised its year-end 2026 target to $6,300 per ounce. Deutsche Bank is calling for $6,000, with an upside scenario near $6,900. Société Générale also sees $6,000. Bank of America predicts gold will hit that level by spring.
Behind this rally is a structural shift in demand. Central banks, particularly in emerging markets, continue to accumulate gold at a pace not seen in decades. Just this past month, People’s Bank of China extended its gold purchases for a 15th consecutive month in January 2026.
Now, if you’ve been with us for any length of time, you probably know this isn’t temporary—it’s a fundamental shift in how central banks around the world are allocating reserves, moving away from dollar dominance and toward hard assets.
And this shift has been building for some time now.
For three consecutive years now, central banks have purchased over 1,000 tons of gold annually. For context, the average annual buying in the decade before 2022 was just 400-500 tons. They’ve more than doubled their accumulation rate.
And as I told you in an essay several months ago, 2025 marked the year when—for the first time since 1996—central banks around the world now hold more gold than U.S. Treasuries as a percentage of their reserves.
I’ve covered this central bank buying phenomenon extensively over the past year. It’s also why we positioned our portfolio so aggressively around gold—recommending new companies and highlighting the ones we already owned that stood to benefit most.
Which brings me to a conversation I had exactly one year ago. In February 2025, I sat down with the CEO of a small exploration company that had just executed a complete strategic pivot—walking away from decades of work in Mexico to start fresh in the Western United States. At the time, they were quietly staking copper-gold porphyry targets across Nevada and Arizona using a specialized exploration methodology. Since that conversation, the stock is up over 260%, pushing it squarely into Casey Free Ride territory.