Gold Price Could Soar to $5,000 Under New Scenarios

Jefferies has built a new quantitative framework for pricing gold that targets $4,650 per ounce by year-end, according to a report. The firm scrapped traditional drivers like real interest rates and the U.S. dollar in favor of central bank reserve behavior and fiscal deficits.

The forecast implies roughly 5% upside from current prices. For stock market investors, the most direct equity expression of a sustained gold rally remains the major gold miners and royalty companies, such as AGN and NEM, whose revenue and free cash flow expand mechanically as the realized gold price rises above their all-in sustaining costs.

The intellectual case for the new model starts with a diagnostic: the old one broke. Gold broke out to the upside from its historical relationship with real rates and the USD in 2024-25, Jefferies wrote. The firm rebuilt from scratch, narrowing its regression window to 30 years, 1995 through 2025, and centering the model on three variables: reserve diversification intensity, a binary flag for whether gold has overtaken U.S. Treasuries in central bank reserve holdings, and the U.S. fiscal deficit as a share of GDP.