Indonesian woman fetches 22-fold gain from gold collection bought 20 years ago

The transaction was recorded and shared on TikTok by a gold shop owner, news outlet Suara.com reported.

Gold shop owner TokoMas Gintar shows off gold jewelry she bought from an Indonesian woman, who first acquired it in the early 2000s. Photo courtesy of TokoMas Gintar

The woman recently went to the shop to sell the gold jewelry she bought in the early 2000s when gold was priced at around IDR100,000 ($5.96 at current rates) per gram.

One Instagram user wrote: "I was still in elementary school in the year 2000, if I knew gold would be expensive, I'd have saved my pocket money to buy gold instead of ice tung tung (an Indonesian dessert)."

The clip, uploaded by TikTok user TokoMas Gintar (Toktokmasgintarbrayan) on Jan. 28, quickly went viral but appears to have since been removed.

Global gold prices have surged 17 times since early 2000 to around $4,841 per ounce. But last week, a sell-off was triggered by U.S. President Donald Trump’s announcement that former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh was his pick to be the next chair of the U.S. central bank.

A staff member of a gold shop is displaying gold jewelry in Lianyungang City, Jiangsu Province, China on January 31, 2026. Photo by CFOTO via AFP)

Matthew Piggott, director of Gold and Silver at Metals Focus, said in an interview with Kitco News that the drops are neither surprising nor structurally damaging.

"Given the pace of the run-up, a correction was inevitable," he said. "This market needed to let off steam."

Although gold and silver are seeing extreme volatility, Piggott does not expect the price action to undermine gold’s reputation as a stable store of value – echoing crashes seen in 1980 or 2011.

"Most gold buyers today are not chasing capital appreciation," he explained. "They’re buying for portfolio protection, currency debasement, and geopolitical risk. Short-term volatility doesn’t change that."