Mark Valek

Mark Valek is a partner at the wealth-management firm Incrementum AG, where he is responsible for portfolio management and research. He applies interdisciplinary thinking to investment and is particularly drawn to the Austrian School of economics, monetary history, gold and the coming paradigm shift in the monetary system. He co-authors Incrementum’s widely read In Gold We Trust report.

Incrementum is based in Liechtenstein, and the report he co-authors with Ronald-Peter Stöferle has appeared annually since 2013, running to several hundred pages and published in Spanish, Chinese and Japanese as well as German and English; the Wall Street Journal once called it the gold standard of gold studies.

It is not really a price forecast. It is an annual audit of the monetary system: real interest rates, debt levels, central bank behaviour and the opportunity cost of holding an asset that yields nothing but cannot be printed.

Valek runs portfolio management and research at the firm and has argued for years that the system is heading for a change of monetary regime rather than through an ordinary cycle, which is why gold and bitcoin turn up in the same analysis rather than as rival trades.