Enam Holdings’ Manish Chokhani: The decade of hard assets

“Everything is at record highs: stocks, homes, gold, Bitcoin, and the Fed still wants to cut rates. If India did this, the rupee would collapse,” warns Manish Chokhani, Director at Enam Holdings. His message is clear: the global market is entering a new era of capital rotation and hard assets are back in favour.

Chokhani sees the ongoing market exuberance as the end of a decade-long cycle dominated by cheap money and tech stocks. What comes next? A powerful shift toward tangible, inflation-resistant assets towards gold, infrastructure, real estate, and commodities.

“You don’t build wealth by buying perfection,” he says. “You build it by buying into pessimism when no one else wants it.”

Chokhani’s thesis isn’t just sentiment. There are tell-tale signs of capital flows and macro signals, with central banks hoarding gold, and now holding more of it as a percentage of reserves than US dollars in some cases.

According to Wells Fargo Investment Institute, this trend will continue, fuelled by rising geopolitical tensions and a global loss of trust in fiat currencies and fiscal discipline.

BlackRock’s mid-year report takes it further:

“This is not a cyclical adjustment; it’s a structural one. The loss of macro anchors like inflation targeting, fiscal discipline, and central bank independence is reshaping global markets.”

In simple terms: investors no longer believe the old rules apply. As these “anchors” break, demand for real, productive, physical assets is surging.

Veteran investor Raamdeo Agrawal recently pointed out BlackRock’s forecast of $68 trillion in infrastructure investment opportunities, underscoring how global capital is aligning behind long-duration, tangible growth.

Investment firm Goldman Sachs believes gold could hit $5,000/oz, if even 1% of US Treasury-held capital moves into bullion. With gold futures already past $3,600/oz, the flight to safety is well underway.

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With the US making up nearly 70% of the global market cap, Chokhani says it’s unrealistic to expect further outperformance without a reset. “We’ve hit the limits of financial asset valuation. The smart money is rotating into real things, into underpriced geographies, into the future.”

And in this environment, asset selection isn’t optional; it’s everything.

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