Which brokers will ship you gold bullion? 🏆

We’re only a month and some change into 2026, but it has already been a big year for gold. The yellow metal is up more than 7% year-to-date, and it surged past the $5,000-per-ounce mark for the first time ever in January, then proceeded to fall more than 10% from that all-time high.

For investors, there are a few pressing questions about the recent gold rally and ensuing volatility: Is there still room to run, how high could the price go, and where and how exactly should you buy gold if you’re interested?

Below, we’re looking at the causes of the surge above $5,000, some price targets for the end of 2026, and a couple of brokers reviewed by NerdWallet that will ship physical gold bullion to you.

Gold prices have surged in 2026 for three main reasons: Geopolitical uncertainty, a declining dollar, and large institutions buying gold to hedge against those two things.

If you’ve opened a newspaper recently, you probably have some awareness of the geopolitical uncertainty in question. The U.S.’s tariff threats, as well as its military intervention in Venezuela and sabre-rattling in Greenland and the Middle East, have created a sense that the world order — and the U.S.’s role in it — is rapidly changing.

Not everyone has been thrilled about the U.S.’s recent moves, particularly with regard to tariffs. That discontentment has contributed to a “sell America” trade, in which international investors have dumped dollar-denominated assets and looked for alternatives (including gold).

That has pushed the value of the dollar down more than 10% in the last year compared against a basket of foreign currencies. The dollar’s fall has further juiced the price of gold in dollars, as gold has a long track record of holding its value against currency declines.

Another news story that had been fueling uncertainty about the U.S. economy, weakness in the dollar, and strong demand for gold was the prospect of another U.S. government shutdown — although gold has retreated below the $5,000 mark since Congress reached a last-minute deal to keep the government funded.

Against this backdrop, institutional investors have loaded up on gold as a hedge against uncertainty. These institutions include countries’ central banks, hedge funds, wealthy individuals and families, and some new types of financial institutions, including stablecoin issuers like Tether.

Gold may be back below the $5,000 mark for now, but its price volatility is likely to continue for the foreseeable future — and many analysts at big banks are still optimistic about where it could go from here.

Seven of the eight “bulge bracket” banks — a grouping of the most dominant banks with U.S. operations, consisting of Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, UBS, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase, Citi, Bank of America and Barclays — have recently updated their gold price forecasts for the end of 2026.

We’ve compiled their highest (“bull case”) estimates below, in order of recency.

What if you want to buy gold bullion — physical gold that you can hold in your hands — through an online investment platform? NerdWallet recently wrapped up our broker review updates for 2026, and two of the brokers we review offer that capability.

The gold bullion offering: Fidelity offers gold bars and various coins in increments ranging from 1 ounce to 1 kilogram. There’s a minimum order size of $1,000, and a minimum initial investment of $2,500 for nonretirement accounts. Fees run from 0.99% to 2.90% on the buy side, and 0.75% to 2.00% on the sell side, depending on volume.Fidelity only acts as an agent for third-party metal bullion companies, such as FideliTrade, which can ship your bullion to you. FideliTrade (Fidelity’s only currently-operating bullion partner) can also store it on your behalf for an annual fee between 0.25% and 1.5% of your account value, depending on what kind of storage you want.

Other things to know about Fidelity: For several years running, Fidelity has won several of NerdWallet’s Best-Of awards for investing platforms, including Best Online Broker for Beginners and Best Investing App. That’s because it marries a wide investment selection and ultra-low fees with strong customer service and a popular, easy-to-use mobile app.

But like any business, it isn’t perfect: If you like to place trades the old-fashioned way, on the phone with a human broker, you’ll find that Fidelity’s fee for broker-assisted trades is on the higher end. Learn more in our full Fidelity review.

The gold bullion offering: Interactive Brokers offers gold bars and coins in increments between 1 ounce and 1 kilogram, for a commission of 0.007% to 0.015% of trade value, depending on volume.

There’s a minimum commission of $2.00 per trade, and monthly storage fees of $0.15 per ounce if you don’t take physical delivery of your bullion.

Other things to know about Interactive Brokers: Interactive Brokers consistently wins NerdWallet’s annual Best Online Broker for Advanced Traders award, owing to its enormous investment selection, top-of-the-line research selection and trading toolkit, and low margin rates.

However, its apps and website are really geared toward seasoned investors, and can be intimidating to navigate for beginners. You can read more in our full Interactive Brokers review.

It might sound absurd, but it’s true — there are also a couple of large retailers that will sell you gold bullion, including for delivery via their websites. These aren’t brokers, per se, but we figured we’d include them here under the umbrella of well-known institutions that you can buy physical gold from.

Owning gold bullion may appeal to some investors because it provides a kind of “apocalypse insurance.” If something terrible happened in your area — like a war, a severe natural disaster, or some kind of political or economic catastrophe that severely disrupted access to banking and financial markets — many investments, like stocks and bonds, might not be worth much.

Although these things represent legal ownership of companies or income streams, they physically consist of just pieces of paper, or ones and zeros in a computer server somewhere. In the absence of a functioning legal system to enforce your rights over the things they represent, they are only pieces of paper or numbers on a computer.

Physical gold is different. Even in a doomsday scenario, gold is still gold. It’s rare, it looks pretty, it’s intrinsically valuable, and you can hold it in your hands. In families that have faced severe adversity — such as those that have had to flee their homeland due to war, instability or persecution — there is often a tradition of passing down precious-metal heirlooms as insurance against a future catastrophe.

Talk to someone who has lived through this kind of crisis and they will likely tell you that even when conditions are at their most dire, physical gold still holds its value, and can still be exchanged for essentials like food and shelter, or for passage to a safer place.

With all that said, there’s a catch: While we’re waiting for the apocalypse, physical gold comes with some hassles that most “paper” investments like stocks, bonds and ETFs don’t have.

For example, it has to be kept safe and in good condition. This creates costs (e.g., safe deposit box fees, cleaning costs) that may eat into your returns. And if you want to cash out your physical gold investment before the apocalypse, you’ll have to find a reputable buyer and physically transport or ship your gold to them.

One way to mitigate these hassles is by paying your broker to take delivery of your gold on your behalf, and store it — both Fidelity and Interactive Brokers offer this service. But this still costs money, and it reduces the “apocalypse insurance” appeal of physical gold ownership. At that point, you may want to consider some other, easier way of getting investment exposure to gold.

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In these times of market volatility, some investors might look to hedge assets such as gold. But others might instead want an investment that offers some level of stability and reliability, such as a fund that regularly pays out income.

Monthly dividend ETFs are one option. But although these funds offer monthly income streams from a single investment, they do have some potential downsides.

A monthly dividend ETF, as its name implies, is an exchange-traded fund that pays out dividends every month. Different monthly dividend ETFs invest in different kinds of assets and use different strategies to achieve this.

Some, like the JPMorgan Equity Premium Income ETF (JEPI), actively trade stocks to generate capital gains that can be paid out to shareholders monthly. Others, like the iShares Preferred and Income Securities ETF (PFF), invest in dividend-paying stocks such as preferred stock. Then there are monthly dividend ETFs that generate their monthly dividend payments from bonds, such as the State Street SPDR Portfolio High Yield Bond ETF (SPHY), or from other types of debt securities such as collateralized loan obligations, as in the case of the Janus Henderson AAA CLO ETF (JAAA).

Below is a list of the top 7 high-dividend ETFs (defined here as a yield of 3% or higher) that pay dividends monthly, in order of dividend yield. To weed out overly-expensive or less-established funds, we’ve filtered this list for ETFs that have existed for at least 5 years, have at least $10 billion in assets, and have expense ratios under 0.5%.

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Below is a table of blue-chip stocks that are reporting earnings in February, with the expected dates and average analyst estimates for their upcoming earnings reports.

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Neither the author nor editor owned positions in the aforementioned investments at the time of publication.

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