My Gold ETF Gained 71 Percent and I Sold It All Out of Guilt

6:15 am on a Tuesday in early January, kitchen still dark except for the tablet's glow on the counter, first coffee steaming next to the cutting board where tomorrow's bread was rising under a towel. I pulled up the portfolio before my eyes were fully awake, the way you check weather, and the top line stopped me mid-sip. The gold ETF, the position I had snagged in October 2023 as a hedge against everything, was up 71.3 percent and had quietly become the single best decision in my entire investing life. I put the mug down. That was the problem.

Eighteen thousand dollars went into that hedge at $1,830 an ounce, deliberately sized at 8 percent of the portfolio, because the note I wrote myself said insurance, not conviction. By that January morning the position was worth $30,900, or 19.4 percent of everythin I owned, and it had gotten there without a single decision on my part. Insurance is not sposed to be your best asset. When it is, something is wrong somewhere, and I spent the next three days deciding the wrong thing was the gold itself.

Here is what the metal did the moment I sold it. It ran from $2,912 to $3,460 an ounce in six months, which is another 18 percent that my conscience no longer had to feel anything about, because I was no longer invited. The guilt cost me $4,100. The rule I ignored cost me more, and that rule fits on an index card.

the $18,000 I spent on dread

October 2023 was a bad month in my house, the kind where the news and the family calendar conspire, and I responded the way a certain kinda person responds, by buying something. Gold at $1,830 felt like the correct flavor of dread: old, boring, indifferent to earnings calls. I did the sizing on purpose, 8 percent of the portfolio, written on an index card that said hedge, target weight 8, trim above 11, and I taped that card inside the office cabinet where I would see it quarterly. The purchase itself took four minutes. Living with a hedge that works, it turns out, takes a stronger stomach than living with one that bleeds alil, and nobody warns you about that either.

nineteen percent of everything, by accident

The drift happened the honest way, which is the dangerous way. Gold climbed thru 2024 while my stocks went sideways, then jumped again in 2025 on central-bank buying and the kinda geopolitical headlines that make people like me buy more of the thing we already regret-proofed. I never added a dollar after October 2023. The position simply became 19.4 percent of the portfolio by rising, the way a high tide becomes the beach, and every quarter I opened the cabinet, read the card that said trim above 11, and closed the cabinet again. Four quarters I did that. The card never changed and neither did I, and by January the tail was wagging a portfolio it had been retained to guard.

the index card from 2023

I still have the card. It says, in my handwriting from a worse month: hedge, target 8 percent, trim above 11, add below 5, review each solstice, because I was that kinda person about it. The instructions were not complicated and they were not wrong. Above 11 percent, sell the excess down to 8. Below 5, top it up. Had I followed my own card on any of four review dates, I would have trimmed about $9,700 in late 2024, banked a 40-ish percent gain on that slice, and walked into 2026 with a right-sized hedge and $9,700 already safe. Instead I sat with a rising number and a rising nausea, which I mistook for a market signal when it was actually a compliance failure. My own compliance. My own card.

Jan 9, one order, all of it

I sold every share on Jan 9 at 10:02 am, one market order, thirty seconds of typing, and the relief arrived before the confirmation did. That relief should have been my warning, because relief is not an investment thesis, it is an exit wound. The reasoning I gave my husband at dinner was pure moral aesthetics: a hedge that outearns the thing it hedges has become a bet, I said, and I did not want to be a gold person. He asked what the card said. I told him. He laughed from the next room, politely outta range.

eleven days in the settlement account

The cash sat there while I felt principled, and then it went into the stock index fund like a confessing parishioner. Eleven days of vacancy. I checked the gold price four times a day during that gap, which told me everything about how principled I actually was, and on the fourth morning I moved the whole $30,900 in one order before the feeling could change its mind again.

what the metal did without me

The chart since January is a smug, rising line. Gold closed January around $2,980, took out $3,100 in March on the tariff escalation, paused while everyone argued about the Fed, and printed $3,460 in the third week of June, which is where it sat when I ultimately made myself do the arithmetic on Jul 4, at a picnic table, in pen. My former position would have gained another $4,100 in six months. The index fund I fled to gained 3.8 percent in the same window, which is fine, which is what it is built to do, and which is a sentence I repeated to myself with decreasing conviction all spring. The hedge would have been 24 percent of the portfolio by July. That fact argues I was half right to sell. The card argues I was entirely wrong about how.

the rule I finally wrote down

What I built in June is embarrassingly similar to the card, except this time it lives in three places. Target weight for gold, 5 percent. Band, plus or minus 2. If the weight closes a quarter above 7, I trim to 5 on the first trading day of the next month, no exceptions, no dinner-table philosophy. If it closes below 3, I add back to 5 with the same dumb discipline. The trades are calendar-driven, not feeling-driven, because my feelings about gold turned out to be a lagging indicator of everythin except my own vanity. A hedge you resize on schedule is a hedge. A hedge you resize by how it makes you feel is a mood ring with an expense ratio, and I owned one of those for six months.

the conversion question for 2026

One useful thing came outta the sale besides tuition. My accountant, reviewing the grasped gains in April, noted that my income this year is unusually low because of the sabbatical I took from March through June, and floated the idea of a Roth IRA conversion on the old rollover account while my bracket sits in the shallows. Moving $28,000 of that account in 2026 at 12 percent, rather than someday at 22, pencils out to approximately $2,800 of tax arbitrage, which almost exactly patches the gold hole I blew in my own net worth through pure sentiment. I am not typically a person who calls mistakes self-funding. This one happened to be, by accident, the same accident that caused it.

6:15 am, one year of coffee later

The kitchen at 6:15 this morning looked like the January original, dark counter, tablet glow, bread under its towel, coffee steaming in the same chipped mug, and I pulled up the portfolio with the same half-awake reflex. The gold line reads 5.1 percent now, a small position doing a small job, and above it sits the schedule taped to the cabinet door, band plus or minus 2, first trading day of the quarter, the card's successor written in larger handwriting. The best asset in my history is gone and the portfolio is more boring than it has been since 2022, which I have decided is the actual definition of a hedge working. I took a sip. The number at the top of the screen was nothin this time, just a portfolio being quiet, and quiet, it turns out, was the thing I was buying all along.