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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Alphaville dug through the weeds of British export stats yesterday to point to China as a major buyer of gold. But let’s just pause to wonder at the runner-up in the pantheon of international gold whales: Azerbaijan.
Gold bugs will know all about Azerbaijan’s lust for the yellow metal, but for the rest of us, here are a few charts to fill you in.
As well as snapping up trophy properties like 78 St James Street, London, 8 Place Vendome, Paris, and Gallery Actor, Moscow, the $70bn State Oil Fund of Azerbaijan has been on an absolute gold rush over the past few years:
That big jump in gold allocation from 20.6 per cent at the end of 2024 to 38.2 per cent at the end of 2025 wasn’t just on account of the massive jump in the gold price either. At the end of 2024 the fund held 146.6 tonnes of gold. By the end of 2025 this had risen to 200 tonnes.
For years, SOFAZ has been one of the most transparent of sovereign wealth funds in terms of its asset ownership and the managers it employs, though it looks as though it has tightened up of late so sadly we can’t update this beauty:
But as it happens, the fund released its performance numbers on Tuesday. The reported numbers look . . . pedestrian:
How can it be humanely possible to report such tepid numbers with a stonking great pile of the shiny stuff whose price has been going to the moon?
Alphaville was forced into the footnotes of the accounts to discover the published numbers exclude gold holdings. Why? We’re not sure. But we’ve had a crack at re-incorporating them to get a sense as to how the fund has really performed:
These sort of numbers would put even New Zealand Super Fund to shame.
Further reading:
— Who’s been buying all the gold? (FTAV)
— Central banks have been buying a squillion tonnes of gold, promise (FTAV)
— Holding gold hasn’t worked. Buy gold. (FTAV)
— Do central banks really have more gold than US Treasury bonds? (FTAV)
