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The Motley Fool has often avoided gold and other precious metals as investments, citing stocks’ better long-term performance.
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However, for diversification, investing in other asset classes can open up opportunities to improve returns and reduce volatility.
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Mining stocks offer exposure to precious metals while also having growth opportunities that the metals themselves lack.
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10 stocks we like better than Agnico Eagle Mines ›
Over the long term, the stock market has performed the best among investment asset classes. Bonds, commodities, foreign currencies, real estate and other assets have had their moments in the sun, while cryptocurrencies have crushed the performance of traditional investments in a relatively short history of 17 years. But The Motley Fool has paid the most attention to investing in stocks because of its proven track record for more than a century.
But here with me Voyager PortfolioI’m deliberately looking at stocks that the Fool hasn’t covered. This led me to choose a company in the precious metals mining industry as the fourth stock in the portfolio. Agnico Eagle Mines (NYSE: AEM) It turned out the lights with its returns in 2025, benefiting from rising gold and silver prices. This raises a simple question: Was last year’s moonshot just another short-term blip in precious metals’ long history of zigzagging movements, or is it some more fundamental shift in the markets that is driving a different way of valuing gold and silver? In this first article of a three-part series, you’ll learn why gold and silver investors are bullish about their market and how Agnico Eagle Mines is poised to take advantage of it.
Precious metals have enjoyed a special status in financial markets for millennia. Gold was the primary store of value in many cultures well into the 20th century, and even after sovereign governments abandoned the gold standard, many investors continued to insist on the yellow metal’s superiority as “real money.” The reputation that precious metals have is strong enough for competing assets to try to take advantage of it, such as bitcoin‘s (CRYPT: BTC) characterization as “digital gold”.
Gold is up 66% in 2025, but its often neglected counterpart, silver, soared 144%. Silver has traditionally taken a backseat to gold, given its relative abundance and much lower price. However, silver has the advantage of being used in a wide variety of industrial applications that create additional demand beyond its monetary value. In particular, silver’s favorable electrical conductivity has made it a vital part of several key technologies, including the energy conversion of solar panels, the power transmission of electric vehicles, and processors within data centers. In fact, the United States Geological Survey added silver to its list of critical minerals in November 2025, demonstrating the value the federal government places on boosting production of the white metal.