Grant Williams

Publisher, Things That Make You Go Hmmm…; Co-Founder, Real Vision; Senior Advisor, VON GREYERZ

Nobody cares about gold until they do — and when they do, it'll be too late to buy at these prices.

Background

Grant Williams is a widely read macro financial writer and investor working outside institutional finance. He is the author of "Things That Make You Go Hmmm" (TTMYGH), a long-form macro research letter he has published since approximately 2009 that has become one of the most widely read independent financial publications among institutional investors. He co-founded Real Vision — the subscription-based financial media platform — alongside Raoul Pal in 2014, and the platform has since grown into one of the larger independent financial media businesses globally.

Williams spent his career as a derivatives trader and portfolio manager across multiple financial centers including London and Singapore, giving him a practitioner's perspective on global capital markets that complements his macro writing. His long-form essays — which combine meticulous historical research, dry wit, and rigorous macro analysis — have earned a devoted following among hedge fund managers, institutional investors, and sophisticated retail investors who value the quality and independence of his thinking. His most famous piece, "Nobody Cares" (about gold), became a widely circulated essay and presentation in institutional circles, laying out the case for gold as the only monetary asset that exists entirely outside the credit system — a framework widely cited in the case for institutional gold ownership. He also serves as an advisor to VON GREYERZ, the Swiss physical gold storage firm, a commercial relationship worth weighing alongside his gold commentary.

Investment Thesis

Williams' gold thesis is grounded in a deceptively simple observation: every asset in the modern financial system — stocks, bonds, real estate, even bank deposits — exists within and depends upon the integrity of the credit system. When you own a stock, you own a claim on a company that owes money and depends on a banking system for capital. When you own a bond, you own a creditor's claim in a system of promises layered upon promises. When you hold cash in a bank, you are an unsecured creditor of an institution levered 10 to 20 to 1. Only gold — physical gold, held outside the banking system — represents an asset that is no one else's liability, requires no counterparty to honor a promise, and cannot be diluted by any institution's decision to expand its balance sheet.

Williams argues that this property — gold as the only truly non-correlated, non-credit-based asset — is precisely why mainstream portfolio theory systematically underweights gold. Modern portfolio construction assumes that the baseline risk asset is currency held in the banking system; every diversifier is assessed by its correlation to other financial assets. Gold's most valuable property — its complete independence from the credit system — cannot be captured within this framework, and is therefore perpetually undervalued by institutional allocation models.

His presentation framework for gold is deliberately non-predictive on timing. Rather than arguing that gold will go up because of X or Y macro trigger, Williams argues that the average investor and institution will come to understand gold's unique properties only after a serious system-level stress event. "Nobody cares until they do" — and by the time the mass of investors cares, the price will reflect that new demand. This framing positions gold not as a short-term macro bet but as insurance against a category of risk that modern financial models largely ignore: systemic credit system failure.

Critiques & Limitations

Williams writes about gold for an institutional audience with unusual care, and his framing of gold as the only non-credit asset is genuinely original and compelling. Critics note that his framework is deliberately non-predictive on timing — "nobody cares until they do" is structurally true but provides no actionable signal for when the transition occurs. His long-form writing style, while exceptionally high quality, is not well-suited to investors who need tactical guidance on position sizing or entry timing. Some critics also argue that his "outside the credit system" framing underweights the practical constraints on gold ownership — custody costs, insurance, liquidity in stress scenarios — that mean even allocated storage ultimately depends on third-party institutions. His association with Real Vision has also introduced an implicit commercial incentive toward maintaining audience engagement through perpetually urgent macro narratives.

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