Hong Kong billionaire Cheah Cheng Hye has quietly turned a quarter of his fortune into gold, betting that in an era of sanctions, seizures, and geopolitical shocks, nothing beats metal you can touch.
“If you have the physical gold in the warehouse or in your bank safe, nobody owes you anything,” he told Bloomberg News last week.
While he didn’t confirm his family office’s performance and holdings, a source told Bloomberg that precious metals make up about 25% of the $1.4 billion portfolio.
The 71-year-old Cheah, who built Value Partners Group into a multibillion-dollar Hong Kong asset manager, is an outlier in the world of ultrahigh-net-worth investing, with the UBS Global Family Office Report 2025 putting the average allocation to gold and other precious metals at just 2% in 2024. Nevertheless, the billionaire urged investors to rethink their mix altogether, advocating a portfolio split of 60% equities, 20% bonds, and 20% precious metals, led by gold.
Cheah’s interview with Bloomberg took place after the gold boom of 2025, when a series of geopolitical shocks encouraged investors to seek safety in the yellow bars, but before gold set another new record, rocketing past $5,000 per ounce for the first time ever on Jan. 24.
As Fortune’s Jim Edwards noted shortly before this new milestone, the Trump “TACO trade” has been driving up the price of gold as central banks hoard bullion to hedge against the dollar. JPMorgan analysts wrote in mid-2025 that more gold increases could be coming if—and when—foreign investors continue shifting away from Treasury bonds.
‘Vault flight’ and distrust of the West
Behind the gold rush is Cheah’s conviction that global finance has entered what he calls a period of massive “vault flight.” The freezing of Russian assets after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and more recent tensions involving Venezuela and Iran, have convinced him that politically exposed money is safer closer to home. Wealthy Asian families, he argued, are increasingly repatriating funds to insulate themselves from U.S. sanctions or potential asset seizures.
For those investors, he said, physical bullion is the preferred refuge. Cheah’s holdings are backed by gold stored in a Hong Kong government warehouse at the city’s airport, and he insists Asia‑based wealth should favor metal in vaults over “paper gold” such as purely synthetic products. His mantra—that nobody owes you anything if you hold the metal yourself—captures both skepticism about Western financial plumbing and a deeply conservative instinct about security.
Cheah’s gold pivot is also institutional. Frustrated by Western vault arrangements after he began buying in 2008, he helped launch the Value Gold ETF in 2010, designed to store physical bullion at Hong Kong’s airport facility. He remains the fund’s largest holder, with a stake worth about 1.3 billion Hong Kong dollars, or roughly $167 million, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.
Cheah’s bullish stance has been buttressed by markets. Entering 2026, gold, silver, copper, and tin have all hit record highs, buoyed by expectations of Federal Reserve easing, political pressure from President Donald Trump’s administration, and persistent geopolitical tensions. Silver, which he also favors, has roughly tripled over the past year, far outpacing even gold’s gains.
While Cheah may be an outlier among ultrahigh-net-worth investors, more big names in finance are coming around to his viewpoint as well. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, for instance, told Fortune in November that it was “semi-rational” for the first time in his life to have gold in one’s portfolio. That same month, “bond king” Jeffrey Gundlach said that gold had become a “real asset class” that was no longer limited to “survivalists” or “crazy speculators.” Instead, he said, people were allocating “real money because it’s real value.” Gundlach suggested maintaining an allocation, perhaps around 15% of a portfolio, because it was consolidating somewhat.
Cheah began his career as a financial journalist with the Asian Wall Street Journal and Far Eastern Economic Review, before establishing the Hong Kong/China equities research department at Morgan Grenfell Group in Hong Kong, where he was also head of research and a proprietary trader.
Roughly a decade ago, in a Q&A with Value Partners, he said the stock market “is about hopes and fears of a society. Stock prices go up or down in response to people’s hopes or fears. You have to also understand psychology, politics, social affairs, and put things in historical and cultural context. Only when you understand the whole range of factors that make people feel hopeful or fearful, then you can make good decisions about whether the market is likely to go up or down. I cannot think of any job more fascinating than this.”
