Like Pedro Campos, I’m puzzled by your looking at a 5-year period when making an argument over investment strategies, especially since your profile states you’re an investment banker.
Your suggested allocation of 50% to gold may or may not work out well over the near-term future. However, as a long-term investment, gold has proven to be a fairly dismal investment.
In the past 100 years, gold lost more than half its value after adjusting for inflation (see https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-year-chart and correct the growth using a CPI calculator such as https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl for the same period of time).
From e.g. 1920 to 2020, a broad index of stocks returned about 7% annually after inflation. This would have grown an investment hundreds-fold after accounting for inflation.
I’m even more puzzled by your apparent assertion that people need to stop listening to anyone who preaches “compounding” of returns.
In the long term, stocks have certainly gone up and gone down. Some years the market will drop like a rock, and others it’ll go up like a rocket. Most years, it does something between the two extremes.
However, the geometric mean return of equities has indeed been on the order of 9%-10%, or 6%-7% after inflation (the exact numbers depend on your choice of start and end times). Thus, if you’re a long-term investor, stocks have historically been your friend, and gold has been your enemy.
Personally, I have a different viewpoint than the one you present as to what a rational investor should do in the current situation. In brief, it’s to accept that crashes are a normal part of investing life, and avoiding panic-selling when the market does that.
Perhaps the single sentence I agree with most in your article is this: “Be very wary of where you are getting your investment advice.”
