Dan Oliver

Founder & Manager, Myrmikan Capital

The gold price is determined by the credit cycle. When credit contracts, gold goes up — not because of fear, but because of mathematics.

Background

Dan Oliver is the founder of Myrmikan Capital, a gold-focused investment firm based in New York. He publishes detailed quarterly research letters that apply Austrian economic theory — particularly the Austrian Business Cycle Theory developed by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek — to the relationship between credit cycles and gold pricing. His work is less well-known than the larger media personalities but is highly respected among sophisticated institutional investors who follow precious metals.

Oliver's analytical framework is unusual in that it approaches gold pricing through a mathematical and theoretical lens rather than through sentiment, technical analysis, or geopolitical narrative. He argues that the conventional understanding of what drives gold prices — inflation fear, dollar weakness, central bank buying — misidentifies the primary mechanism. In his model, gold prices are fundamentally determined by the state of the credit cycle.

Investment Thesis

Oliver's central argument — developed in a series of detailed research letters and in his occasional public presentations — is that gold should be understood not as a commodity priced in dollars but as a monetary anchor against which the value of credit-based claims should be measured. In boom phases of the credit cycle, credit expands relative to gold, suppressing the gold price. When credit contracts — either through default, deflation, or monetisation — gold rises relative to the shrinking stock of valid credit claims.

This framework leads to a specific and counterintuitive prediction: the biggest gold moves occur not during inflationary booms but during credit contractions and financial crises, when the destruction of credit-based claims forces a revaluation of gold as the residual monetary anchor. Oliver applies this to mining equities with a particular focus on companies whose gold reserves represent deeply undervalued call options on future gold prices — he looks for asymmetric situations where the market has priced in near-term operational risks but has not appropriately valued the long-duration gold exposure embedded in the resource base.

Critiques & Limitations

Oliver's research, while intellectually compelling, operates at a level of theoretical abstraction that makes it difficult to translate into actionable position sizing for most investors. The Austrian credit cycle framework he applies is not mainstream among economists or financial analysts, and its specific predictive implications for gold timing are less precise than his framework's theoretical elegance implies. His quarterly letters are infrequent and require significant economic background to fully evaluate — this limits their accessibility to the broader investment community, which may be part of why his work has not reached the audience its quality merits.

Notable Calls