The True Global Market-Cap Weighted Portfolio: Gold as 3rd Largest Asset Class?

A market-capitalization weighted portfolio is one where assets are held in proportion to their total market value (share price * # of shares). For example, if you were to buy into the S&P 500 index (a cap-weighted index), right now you would be buying ~170 times more of Amazon (~$2 Trillion value) as Best Buy ($13 Billion value). But as the share value of each company changes, you wouldn’t have to do anything to maintain market-cap weighting.

What if you wanted to weigh your entire portfolio based on values of all the investable assets in the world? This chart from WisdomTree’s 2/26 update breaks it down for you (found via Weekly Chartstorm).

Roughly, you’re looking at 50% equities, 30% debt (fixed income/bonds), 12.7% of gold (!), and 1% in digital assets. The gold number surprised me. These values are credited to Bloomberg and Wisdomtree as of 2/2/26. Market cap values are in billions.

Let’s check some of those numbers. The chart estimates the total market value of all the equities in the world at ~$135 Trillion, which also roughly matches other sources. The chart estimates the total market value of all the gold in the world at ~$33 Trillion, which roughly matches other sources. That gives us a ratio of roughly 4:1 of stocks:gold.

However, I wrote in 2016 about the idea of Investing 1% Of Your Portfolio Into Gold, where another source said that the world market cap weighting for gold at that time was a tad under 1%. Looking closer, this number appears to be an estimate of the world’s total quantity of gold held for investment.

At first, I thought this was like how you can’t own every business in the world since many are privately-held, when we talk about equities we are actually talking about publicly-investable businesses. Okay, so it looks like roughly 50% of the gold above ground is used in jewelry and 15% for industrial purposes. But still, isn’t gold jewelry also considered an investment? How do you decide how much of gold is an investment asset by someone, and how much isn’t? Maybe a true global market-cap weighting of gold is not quite as high as in the chart of above, but still significantly higher than what I previously thought.