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The Motley Fool has often shied away from gold and other precious metals as an investment, citing the better long-term performance of stocks.
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For diversification, however, investing in other asset classes can open up opportunities to improve returns and lessen volatility.
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Mining stocks offer exposure to precious metals while also having growth opportunities that the metals themselves lack.
Over the long run, the stock market has been the top performer among investment asset classes. Bonds, commodities, foreign currencies, real estate, and other assets have had their moments in the sun, while cryptocurrencies have crushed the performance of traditional investments over a relatively short 17-year history. But The Motley Fool has paid the most attention to stock investing because of its time-tested track record over more than a century.
But here with my Voyager Portfolio, I’m deliberately looking at stocks that the Fool hasn’t covered. That led me to choose a company from the precious metals mining industry as the portfolio’s fourth stock. Agnico Eagle Mines (NYSE: AEM) shot the lights out with its returns in 2025, benefiting from soaring prices of gold and silver. That raises a simple question: Was last year’s moonshot just another short-term blip in the long history of zig-zag moves for precious metals, or is some more fundamental change in the markets prompting a different way of valuing gold and silver? In this first article of a three-part series, you’ll learn why gold and silver investors are bullish about their market and how Agnico Eagle Mines is poised to take advantage.
Precious metals have enjoyed a special status in the financial markets for millennia. Gold was the primary store of value in many cultures well into the 20th century, and even after sovereign governments went off the gold standard, plenty of investors have still insisted on the superiority of the yellow metal as “real money.” The reputation that precious metals have is strong enough that competing assets try to play off it, such as Bitcoin‘s (CRYPTO: BTC) characterization as “digital gold.”
Gold jumped 66% in 2025, but its oft-neglected counterpart, silver, soared 144%. Silver has traditionally taken its place as second fiddle to gold, given its relative abundance and much lower price. However, silver has the advantage of being used in a wide variety of industrial applications that create additional demand beyond its monetary value. In particular, silver’s favorable electrical conductivity has made it a vital part of several key technologies, including solar panel energy conversion, electric vehicle power transmission, and processors within data centers. Indeed, the U.S. Geological Survey added silver to its list of critical minerals in November 2025, demonstrating the value that the federal government places on encouraging production of the white metal.
