Gold is at a three-month high, and per The Sun's coverage, plenty of people are now wondering whether they should be buying. I understand the impulse. When an asset is rising and your stocks are wobbling, gold starts to look like the responsible adult in the room.

Slow down before you do anything.

First, the honest math on how most people actually invest in gold. There are three routes. Physical coins and bars, which come with dealer markups, storage costs, and insurance headaches. Gold ETFs, which track the price closely and charge a small annual fee. And gold mining stocks, which do not track gold at all; they track mining company fortunes, sometimes badly. If you want gold exposure, the ETF route is the only one I would call practical for a regular person.

Second, and more important: gold produces nothing. It pays no dividend, earns no interest, and reinvests nothing. A share of a broad index fund owns companies that grow earnings and compound over decades. A gold bar sits in a vault and waits for someone else to pay more for it. Over very long stretches that has been a losing race. Since I opened my first brokerage account in the 1980s, stocks have trounced gold, and it isn't close.

But.

Gold has one genuine job in a portfolio, and that is behaving differently from everything else. When stocks fall hard, gold sometimes holds or rises. Not always, but often enough to soften the blow. That is the entire case for owning it. Not the price chart, not the three-month high. The insurance case.

Which brings me to the problem with this week's news. Buying gold because it just hit a three-month high is momentum thinking, and momentum thinking is how people end up owning an asset after its good run instead of before it. I have watched this movie with tech stocks in 1999, housing in 2006, and crypto more times than I can count. The asset that feels most urgent to buy today is rarely the one you will be glad you chased.

If you believe gold belongs in your plan, the sensible approach is small and steady. Somewhere between nothing and perhaps 5 or 10 percent of a portfolio, bought in regular pieces over time regardless of the price that day. The same patience that makes index funds work makes gold exposure tolerable. Buying a lump at a high because a headline spooked you is the opposite of that.

And ask yourself the question that matters more than the gold price: what is this money for? If it is retirement money with a decade or more to grow, stocks have historically been the better engine. If it is money you cannot afford to see drop, gold will not protect you from everything either.

Gold at a high is not a signal. It is just a price. Patience and consistency beat price-chasing in every market cycle I have lived through, and I have lived through all of them since the late '80s.

As always, this is my perspective, not professional financial advice. Talk to a qualified advisor before making decisions with your money.