Side holding in gold delivers big for Willy Packer and Western Suburbs-heavy Investigator investment fund

The surging value of its gold holdings has propelled WA’s biggest investment fund to its highest return in six years. The $2.1 billion Investigator Trust, managed by Willy Packer’s Packer & Co, delivered a 21.5 per cent gain in 2025 as its weighting to gold proved an unexpected boon for its Western Suburbs investor base. It is the fund’s best return since the 32.7 per cent it made in 2019, doubling the All Ordinaries Accumulation Index’s 10.6 per cent gain for the year and easily exceeding the 12.9 per cent returned by the Australian dollar-denominated MSCI World Accumulation Index. However, Packer & Co also used its bi-annual newsletter to call out the investment boom in Artificial Intelligence, drawing parallels with the Dotcom bubble that burnt hundreds of billions of dollars when it burst 25 years ago. “The spoils of victory and fear of becoming redundant have pushed companies into a race to outspend each other,” the Cottesloe-based fund manager said of the huge global investment in AI. “Such intense competition does not bode well for future profitability, and investors could suffer the same fate as those in previous technology revolutions. “New technologies often ignite speculative booms . . . yet almost without exception, they (are) dreadful investments in their infancy.” Packer & Co dramatically sold down Investigator’s share investments ahead of COVID-19, redeploying the proceeds into safer, lower-returning government bonds, gold and term deposits. It continues to take a cautious investment stance, despite missing out on surging stock markets over the past five years. Packer & Co argues that record equity markets, expensive share valuations and rising global economic concerns make many shares too risky. As of December 31, it said, nearly half of Investigator’s portfolio remained in gold (11 per cent), bonds and cash, “given our cautious positioning”. Packer & Co said the gold holdings returned 52 per cent for the year after bullion soared in value by about 70 per cent in 2025. However, the portfolio was also helped by strong gains by several of Investigator’s leading equity investments, including Chinese online marketplace Alibaba and Asian conglomerate Jardine Matheson (up 63 per cent) and Chinese search engine Baidu (47 per cent better). Investigator’s biggest single investment remains Chinese oil giant CNOOC, which accounts for 6.9 per cent of the portfolio, followed by a new play in US health insurer Centene and uranium producer NexGen Energy (4.1 per cent).