From $3,000 to $69k: Indonesian woman makes over $66k selling gold collection bought 20 years ago

An Indonesian woman's decades-long investment paid off in a big way recently, after she profited more than $66,000 by selling off gold that was purchased over 20 years ago.

The sale was documented and posted to TikTok by a gold shop owner, according to news site Suara.com.

The clip showed a woman, said to be a mother, selling an old gold collection which she'd purchased in the early 2000s for a reported 41 million rupiah (S$3,078).

According to Suara.com, the price of gold per gram at the time was in the range of 100,000 rupiah.

The value has since increased more than 22-fold, with the mother collecting over $69,000 on the sale.

"Now it is sold for 927 million rupiah, the profit is 886 million," said the owner of the woman's collection, eliciting astonished reactions from netizens.

Wrote one user on Instagram: "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 video swiftly went viral after being posted by TikTok user Toktokmasgintarbrayan on Jan 28, but it appears to have since been taken down.

Gold prices have rallied since last year, gaining more than 60 per cent, reported CNA in January. 

Spot gold on Wednesday (Jan 28) was up four per cent at US$5,393.19 (S$6,849) an ounce at one point, according to Reuters, after breaching the US$5,000 threshold for the first time on Jan 25. 

However, both gold and silver prices took a historic plunge on Friday — suffering the sharpest one-day decline since the 1980s, Lianhe Zaobao reported.

In Friday's trading, gold prices fell more than 12 per cent to below US$5,000 (about S$6,350) per ounce, while the largest one-day drop in silver prices was 36 per cent.

Blockchain news resource JinseFinance noted on Jan 31 that multiple technical indicators had already issued warning signals before the crash, with the Relative Strength Index (RSI) in recent weeks indicating that gold and silver may have been overbought and faced a pullback.

Dominik Sperzel, head of trading at Heraeus Precious Metals, was cited as saying that the volatility was extremely high.

"However, we need to be prepared for the rollercoaster to continue," he said.

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candicecai@asiaone.com