Gold and silver’s dramatic start to 2026 has seen trading and investment records tumble at world-leading marketplace BullionVault.
Launched in 2005 and now caring for a record £7.9 billion of gold, silver, platinum and palladium for its users, BullionVault enables private investors to buy and sell securely stored precious metal from as little as 1 gram at a time.
Last month’s huge price moves drew a record number of both buyers and sellers to gold and silver, with buyers outnumbering sellers by the widest margin since the Covid pandemic.
The West London fintech also attracted a record number of new users in January, outrunning the previous monthly high by a massive 80.9%. Trading on BullionVault set a new record too, with £854 million of physical metal changing hands last month, topping US$1.1 billion and more than 3.5 times last year’s 12-month average value.
Record-high prices are meeting record trading and demand in gold and silver,” says BullionVault director of research Adrian Ash. “For every seller there were two buyers in January.
“New investors starting to build their holdings are of course smaller than the average position held by longer-term owners. But while leveraged speculators chase their tails in derivatives bets and exchange-traded contracts, the physical bullion market is evenly balanced overall.”
With the price of gold surging by 9.3% in January to average a record £3506 per Troy ounce, the number of people choosing to sell gold on BullionVault jumped by 48.9% to a new monthly record.
But the number of buyers rose faster to a new record of its own, jumping by 57.7% with the sharpest increase since the Covid crisis went global in March 2020.
Together, that put the Global Gold Investor Index − a unique measure of actual buying and selling decisions in the ‘safe haven’ metal − higher by 3.4 points from December at 58.5, the strongest reading since the depths of the pandemic in November 2020.
Any reading above 50.0 signals that the number of buyers was greater than the number of sellers. The Gold Investor Index set an all-time peak of 71.7 in September 2011 − peak of the global financial crisis − and it fell to a series low of 47.5 in March 2024 as a rise in prices driven by central-bank buying and Chinese demand spurred profit-taking by Western private investors.
Says Ash: “The past week’s huge spike and crash in gold and silver prices now puts the hard-money metals back at were new all-time highs only a couple of weeks ago. New account openings show no sign of slowing down. The monetary and political backdrop remains very positive for precious metals in 2026.
Silver had already drawn a record number of both buyers and sellers on BullionVault at the end of 2025. But those figures leapt by a further 62.9% and 85.9% respectively in January as the precious metal made its steepest month-average price rise since New Year 1980, jumping by 41.6% to £68.08 per Troy ounce.
That saw the Silver Investor Index hit a new post-pandemic high, extending the prior month’s 9.6-point leap with a rise of 4.0 points in January to 65.7, the strongest reading since April 2020.
The Silver Investor Index set a lifetime record of 75.1 in March 2020 as buyers leapt on the industrially-useful precious metal’s Covid crisis price crash. Its series low came on heavy profit-taking in March 2024.
By weight last month, customers of BullionVault sold 25.8 tonnes of silver more than they bought as a group, marking the heaviest net liquidation since the record outflow of 32.2 tonnes in April 2024. This January’s net selling took the total quantity of silver owned by BullionVault users 2.2% lower to 1,126.3 tonnes, the smallest since November 2020 but worth a new record of £2.7bn.
Gold in contrast saw only a little net selling overall in January, with BullionVault users liquidating less than 32 kilograms to cut total client holdings by 0.1% to 43.5 tonnes. While that was the smallest quantity since June 2020, it was worth a new record of more than £5.0bn.
Finding 9-in-10 of its client base in Western Europe and North America, BullionVault last month saw an unprecedented number of private investors use its platform for the first time, with the count of new customers leaping by 122.5% compared to December’s figure and beating 2025’s month-average by 338.9%.
The number of new UK users beat its previous record (August 2011) by 85.3% and the Eurozone topped its prior peak (March 2020) by 31.9%. But the USA lagged its all-time peak (August 2011) by 42.4%, extending its run of relative under-performance.
