Wealth: Are gold and bitcoin the last true safe havens for your savings right now?

Oh how bitcoin’s early adopters are relishing their “I told you so” moment.

Donald Trump’s second presidency has left many investors watching their retirement savings through their fingers as portfolios yo-yo in value. At the time of writing, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was heading for its worst April performance since the Great Depression in 1932.

The “Orange Crash” as it’s been dubbed, has sent equities and bonds tumbling amid a flurry of headlines. Meanwhile the US Dollar Index is down 9 per cent in 2025 alone, scraping a three-year low. Consumer sentiment in America is close to mid-pandemic levels of misery. Investors have been spun, bumped and bruised through the washing machine of geopolitical headline events.

It’s not meant to be like this. Sovereign risk — that is, the chance that a government screws-up your finances — only used to be an issue for citizens of failed states. Not so much now. And a lot of early bitcoin investors are feeling quietly vindicated as traditional stock pickers start to revisit its long-term case as a safe-haven asset.

I won’t get all nerdy for The Nightly readers trying to relax, but bitcoin was never meant to correlate to traditional finance. Hidden in the computer code of the first bitcoin, created just after the financial crisis in 2009, is a snarky comment about bank bailouts. Satoshi Nakamoto, its pseudonymous creator, saw bitcoin as an asset free from sovereign and monetary risk, as well as traditional counter-party risk. In theory, bitcoin was made for times like this. It’s why people refer to it as “digital gold”

In practice, for much of its young life, bitcoin has tracked business cycles and still does. So should Australian investors see it as a safe haven to wait out the tariff storm?

Gold is still the obvious choice during times of trouble. It’s the asset you buy when you don’t trust governments to behave — which is to say, now. Prices have pierced new highs, recently nudging past $3500 per ounce. Yes, certain technical indicators may point to gold being overbought in the short term, but this isn’t just about short-term trades, it’s about long-term trust and preservation of wealth. Gold doesn’t default. It doesn’t get diluted. It doesn’t tweet monetary policy decisions from a golf cart.

Now to bitcoin. For the uninitiated, bitcoin is a digital asset that runs on a decentralised, public network. It is autonomous and borderless and can’t be controlled by any government or bank. Not even Trump. Hence a lot of investors see the original cryptocurrency — like gold — as a hedge against sovereign risk. It’s the only asset on Earth with a mathematically enforced supply limit. No politician can print more. No central bank can tweak its issuance rate. And unlike gold, trillions of dollars can be quickly transferred across the world without the need for shipping containers or private security.

That’s not to say bitcoin is perfect. It’s not. It is volatile and a lot of it is tightly held by a few wallets. The scope to move its price does exist. But the idea that bitcoin has no place in serious portfolios because it’s “just computer code’” — ones and zeros — is a bit of a nonsense. Most of us happily hold invisible assets in our portfolios that are only worth what people are willing to pay. The majority of any ASX exchange traded fund investment doesn’t “exist” either. It comprises intangibles like brand, reputation, goodwill, algorithms, culture and so on.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that investors are turning to gold and bitcoin in the current environment. Morningstar analysts report that the best opportunities for returns are no longer in the US, where valuations look stretched and political risks are mounting. Capital is becoming nomadic — seeking yield and safety where governments can’t screw-up your portfolio. Bitcoin is worth a look.

Pav Hundal is lead market analyst at Swyftx