There’s a gold rush in crypto and precious metals ETFs. Is it time to grab a shovel?

Every week, NerdWallet writers run a screen of inexpensive, U.S.-based, non-leveraged, non-inverse exchange-traded funds for our Best ETFs article. Over the last few weeks, something has jumped out at us about the resulting table of top-performing funds: It’s almost entirely crypto and precious metals ETFs.

What does it mean when funds that track unusual commodities like silver, gold, Bitcoin and Ethereum are outperforming classic investments like stock market index funds? And how long might this trend last? We asked economists for their take.

The U.S. Dollar Index, a measure of the dollar’s value against a basket of foreign currencies, is down more than 8% in 2025. Meanwhile, indexes for most other big currencies, like the euro, Japanese yen, British pound sterling and Swiss franc, are up for the year.

According to Dr. Ryan Farley, an associate professor of finance at the University of Tennessee Haslam College of Business, investors in hard commodities like precious metals and cryptocurrencies may be profiting from the dollar’s misfortune.

“Commodities, including metals, can often move inversely to the U.S. dollar,” Farley said in an email interview.

“Commodities are an alternative store of value, and metals in particular, given their durability compared to other commodities like pork belly or orange juice. Crypto can have a similar relationship,” Farley said, although he noted that crypto prices have a multitude of other drivers.

Sidenote: Subscribers to our Substack newsletter, The Nerdy Investor, first read about this phenomenon back in July, when we wrote about how Bitcoin’s dollar returns are much higher than its returns in better-performing currencies. You can read that newsletter issue here.

According to Dr. Keith Jakob, a professor of finance at the University of Montana College of Business, fear and uncertainty are driving investors to look for stores of value outside of the dollar.

“If people are fearful that the strength of the U.S. dollar, as the global currency, is getting weaker — and there are organizations like BRICS trying to dethrone the U.S. dollar — there are people reaching out for other assets, like gold and crypto, as a different store of value,” Jakob says.

BRICS refers to a group of countries that originally consisted of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, but has since expanded to include many other developing countries that are not geopolitically aligned with the U.S. In recent years, BRICS summits have often discussed the idea of developing a new international currency that would reduce member countries’ reliance on the dollar for foreign trade, although these efforts are still in their infancy.

“I’m not totally convinced it’s gonna happen, but there are definitely a large set of players out there trying to change the rules about international trade and the reliance on the dollar,” Jakob says, referring to the possibility of a global shift away from the dollar.

Farley noted that while international events are part of the reason for the dollar’s recent weakness, domestic events play a role as well.

“There’s a considerable increase in global instability compared to recent history. Some of the drivers include political instability in frontier markets, wars in the EMEA [Europe, Middle East and Africa] region, inflation in a variety of countries, political polarization in the U.S., unsustainable sovereign debt in developed countries, and an extreme uncertainty in U.S. fiscal policy,” he said.

Back in May, Moody’s Ratings became the last of the “big three” credit analytics agencies to downgrade the U.S. government’s credit rating due to deficit concerns related to tax cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The other two, S&P Global and Fitch Ratings, had already downgraded the U.S.’s rating years ago during previous debt-related political fights.

Jakob added that recent events in global metals markets, such as China’s new export restrictions on industrially-valuable rare earth elements, may also be a factor in the strong performance of mining and metals ETFs. Industrial metals and precious metals are overlapping groups; gold and silver are both sometimes used in electronics manufacturing.

Farley and Jakob both noted that crypto is a questionable store of value during periods of economic uncertainty, based on its history of booms and busts.

“I think the argument for cryptos as an uncorrelated asset and/or inflation hedge is overstated. There’s plenty of evidence that crypto also trades like a typical U.S. risk asset. We saw this during 2022 and during market corrections this year in the U.S. equity market. Crypto is also subject to regulatory volatility that isn’t necessarily related to metals,” Farley said.

A “risk asset” is a volatile investment, such as a tech stock or a call option, that tends to go up a lot in good times, and down a lot in hard times. They’re generally not great stores of value. Back in April, when the S&P 500 index fell more than 10% from its beginning-of-year price due to tariff-related fears, Bitcoin fell by a similar amount.

According to Jakob, certain metals could also see their prices fall in the event of a downturn in the U.S. economy or stock market. “Other metals that are used more for industrial purposes — I could see them slowing down dramatically if there’s a slowdown in the economy,” he says.

Even gold could slump if investors — institutional investors in particular — decide that they’ve stockpiled enough of it to ride out the current global uncertainty. “There’s been price support from central banks accumulating gold. If this demand is satisfied, that price support will weaken,” Farley said.

Last week, the price of an ounce of gold gold fell by about 8%, although it’s still trading near historic highs above $4,000.

If you want to invest in crypto or metals directly, rather than through an ETF, buying crypto outright or trading precious metal futures are also possibilities. NerdWallet maintains roundups of the best crypto exchanges and best futures trading platforms.

And if you want to profit directly from the volatility in the U.S. dollar and other currencies, you could try your hand at forex trading.

But it’s worth noting that these types of investing are considerably riskier than buying and holding stocks or ETFs, and they also tend to have much steeper learning curves. For most investors, portfolio diversification is the best defense against the uncertainties of the future.