Investors stay away from gold as confidence shatters

London

INVESTORS seeking alternative assets are moving on from gold, whose failure to perform when its price was expected to rise and recent volatility as demonstrated by Monday's price plunge are prompting them to seek returns and protection elsewhere.

While the market's bedrock of jewellery buyers and central banks has largely stayed intact, the wider investment universe long courted by banks and gold bugs is now once-bitten, twice shy.