Gold in Ringgit Just Doubled. Nobody Was Watching.

Gold hit RM636 per gram this month. Two years ago it was RM293. That's a 117% gain — and the ringgit wasn't weakening during that run. It was getting stronger. The dollar went from 4.47 to 3.94.

That detail matters more than most people realise. The usual story for gold in Malaysia is that it wins when the ringgit falls — currency depreciation stacks on top of the dollar price move, you get a double tailwind. That's been the narrative for years.

But that's not what happened here. This time gold won with the wind in its face. The stronger ringgit was working against Malaysian holders and it still doubled.

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What actually happened

Gold in US dollar terms went from roughly $2,040 per ounce in January 2024 to $5,020 today. That's a 146% gain in two years — the strongest two-year run gold has had in a generation.

You don't earn dollars. You earn ringgit. In January 2024, at $2,040 per ounce with the dollar at RM4.47, one gram of gold cost you about RM293. Today at $5,020 with the dollar at RM3.94, that same gram is RM636.

The ringgit's strength cost Malaysian holders about 29 percentage points of return. They still made 117%. That's the number that should reframe how you think about this asset.

Most people tracking gold here were conditioned to watch the ringgit. When it weakened past 4.70 in late 2023, gold looked like a currency play and people started paying attention. Then the ringgit recovered — hit 3.88 at one point, its strongest since 2018 — and a lot of people assumed the trade was over. The tailwind was gone.

What they missed is that the trade was never really about the ringgit. It was about gold.

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What everything else did

Asset	~2-Year Return	RM100k becomes
Gold (MYR) winner	+117%	RM217,000
KLCI (total return)	~+11%	RM111,000
EPF (est. avg dividend)	~+11%	RM111,000
ASB	~+11%	RM111,000
Klang Valley property	+4–6%	RM104,000–106,000

EPF, ASB, and property are not useless — they're the backbone of most Malaysian financial plans. But if your entire net worth sits in those three buckets, you didn't participate in the best-performing major asset of the last two years.

Standard advice still pushes a 5% gold allocation. A hedge. At 5%, a 117% gain adds maybe 6% to a portfolio. You'd barely feel it. At 20%, that same move adds 23 percentage points to total returns.

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Why gold moved this hard

Four things ran concurrently, and they don't typically all show up at the same time.

Central banks kept buying. In 2023 and 2024, central banks bought over 1,000 tonnes of gold each year — the two highest annual totals ever recorded. 2025 came in at 863 tonnes, still well above the decade average. Poland alone added 102 tonnes last year and raised its target allocation to 30% of reserves. The World Gold Council's 2025 survey found 43% of central banks plan to increase gold holdings in the next 12 months — the highest reading since the survey started. When the institutions that control monetary systems are accumulating the asset, that tells you something about what they think is coming.

The dollar lost credibility. The ringgit didn't strengthen because Malaysia got dramatically richer. The dollar weakened. The DXY dropped about 11% over the past year. US federal debt crossed $36 trillion. Tariff policy is creating inflation without growth. Gold priced in dollars goes up when the dollar loses credibility. That's what happened.

Geopolitical risk got priced in permanently. The Iran situation in early March sent gold briefly past $5,400 before it pulled back. But the pattern over three years has been consistent — every spike has a higher floor than the last. The market stopped treating geopolitical risk as a temporary premium and started pricing it as a structural condition.

ETF inflows changed the demand picture. Gold-backed ETFs hit their highest quarterly inflows ever in Q4 2025 — 175 tonnes in a single quarter. Global ETF holdings are approaching the all-time highs set in 2020. Retail investors who wouldn't have touched physical gold are now in through funds. That's a structural demand shift, not a trade.

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What comes next

Nobody knows where gold goes from RM636. The conditions that drove the move haven't resolved — central bank buying is structural, the dollar's credibility problem doesn't get fixed without fiscal discipline no political environment supports, geopolitical tension isn't winding down.

The counterargument is price. At $5,000 per ounce, gold is expensive by historical standards. There's real risk of a sharp correction if the Fed signals rate hikes, if US growth surprises to the upside, or if the dollar rebounds. Entry at these levels requires accepting more volatility than entry at $2,000 did.

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How to hold it without losing 8% to premiums

This is where most people mess up. They understand the thesis, decide to act, then get eaten alive by the spread between spot price and what they actually pay.

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On sizing: if you have zero gold exposure, 5–10% of investable assets is defensible at any price level. If you believe the macro thesis — persistent dollar weakness, structural central bank buying, no resolution to geopolitical instability — 15–20% has academic backing. A University of Zurich study published this month found that an 85/15 equity-to-precious-metals split delivered higher long-term risk-adjusted returns than a pure equity portfolio going back to 1972.

The conventional wisdom of 5% hasn't caught up with the data.

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Gold doesn't replace EPF, ASB, or property. Those do specific jobs. Gold does something different — it holds value outside the Malaysian financial system, outside the dollar system, outside any single country's monetary decisions.

When all of those systems are under pressure at the same time — which is roughly the situation from 2022 to now — gold doesn't just protect. It compounds.

RM293 to RM636 in two years. With a stronger ringgit working against it the entire time.

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