Way back in olden times — seven days ago — Goldman Sachs lifted its year-end gold price target to $5,400 from $4,900.

Fast forward and the yellow metal is already at $5,500, and it’s almost doubled from a year ago.

Gold’s truly gone parabolic, as has the entire precious metals complex. That Coinbase this week added copper and platinum futures to its platform gives a clear indication that the metals move is now being driven by a decidedly retail crowd of investors. Who needs fartcoin (down 83% from its July peak) when you can trade metals that have been popular for 6,000 years?

So a new note from JPMorgan global market strategist Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou is worth considering.

There’s a lot of talk about gold replacing, to some degree, the bond portion of a balanced portfolio. With the run-it-hot, norm-trampling policies from the Trump administration, the perception is that the bigger risk is inflation and currency debasement over an outright recession that bonds would protect against.

It’s a theory Panigirtzoglou explored back in October and, if anything, it has more relevance now, post-Venezuela, Greenland, and on the cusp of Iran part II, and after a coordinated “rate check” by U.S. and Japanese authorities to bolster the Japanese yen.

The JPMorgan quant has now assessed what would happen if private investor allocations to gold — which he calculates to be worth 3% of their portfolios right now — would rise to 4.6% in the coming years, as investors swap out longer-duration bonds for the yellow metal.

“This 4.6% allocation to gold would imply a theoretical price of $8,000-$8,500,” he writes.

Granted, the road to $8,500 could be a windy one. The same analyst says commodity trading advisers, or momentum traders, are very overbought both silver and gold.

“This raises the risk of profit taking or mean reversion in both gold and silver over the near term,” he says.