Gold moved up 24 places on the Roundtable 100 in the Oct. 30 ranking. The precious metal jumped from No. 97 to No. 73 in the power ranking. View the original article to see embedded media. Go
Gold moved up 24 places on the Roundtable 100 in the Oct. 30 ranking.
The precious metal jumped from No. 97 to No. 73 in the power ranking.
View the original article to see embedded media.
Published with TheStreet, The Roundtable 100 ranks the top 100 publicly traded technology growth assets. Each is scored from 0 to 100 by the analysts of the Blue Ribbon Committee on five variables, Team, Safety, Value, Innovation, and Market Dominance, with the average forming the asset's Power Ranking. The list refreshes every Friday after the U.S. market close.
The RTB 100 committee's analysts rank an asset on the basis of its potential to grow in the future.
The precious metal scored a Team score of 84 out of 100, a Safety score of 75, and a Market Dominance score of 77. But it scored low on Innovation and Value variables.
The RTB 100 analysts granted gold an overall score of 73 out of 100.
However, Bitcoin Magazine's Sean Hagan is not so bullish on the bullion. He said he used to be a gold believer but now, the leading market analyst sees a threat to the metal’s core use case coming from a physics lab.
“Why would nation states store a tremendous amount of their wealth in an asset that another man can print?” Hagan told TheStreet Roundtable, a question aimed squarely at central banks. “Typically not a very good idea.”
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On Oct. 21, San Francisco-based Marathon Fusion said it had transmuted mercury into stable gold using fusion neutrons. The company put its rate at 10 times the record the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) set in 2025.
For scale, CERN’s ALICE experiment produced roughly 29 trillionths of a gram of gold over four years. Each nucleus lasted "just a tiny fraction of a second."
The process bombards mercury-198 with neutrons in a reactor’s bleeding blanket. That produces mercury-197, which decays into gold-197, the metal’s only stable isotope.
Marathon was founded in 2023 by SpaceX and Princeton veterans. It is also backed by the U.S. Department of Energy and Breakthrough Energy.
Hagan said gold is “only valuable as a store of wealth given that it’s relatively scarce.”
He also argued that AI and increasing computing power are making scientific progress exponential.
Hagan pointed to Marathon’s 2025 paper, which estimated about two metric tons of gold a year per gigawatt of thermal power. He called the figure “probably an optimistic take” and has only been demonstrated in simulations, not the real world.
He still believes that the the technology poses “a potential grave threat” to gold’s store-of-value role. He said he expects “massive demonetization” over time.
The lab-grown diamond market offers a preview. Wholesale diamond prices are down about 50% from early-2022 highs.
Despite this risk, gold has experienced a strong run to the upside over the last 12-24 months. It hit an all time high of $5,595 on Jan. 29 and remains a focus of Wall Street’s 2026 forecasts. For investors weighing Bitcoin against gold, Hagan’s point is that a scarcity premium can fade long before the price collapses.
See the full ranking.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Investments are subject to market risk. Always conduct your own research before making any investment decisions.
Disclosure: RTB Digital, Inc. (Nasdaq: RTB), publisher of the Roundtable 100, is itself a ranked constituent of the index. The Roundtable 100 is published for informational purposes only and is not investment advice, an offer, or a recommendation to buy or sell any security, commodity or digital asset. Rankings reflect the views of Roundtable analysts as of the ranking date. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal.
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