Mark
O’Byrne

My degree was in History and Greek & Roman Civilisation, which is an unusual training for a bullion career and a more useful one than it sounds. Monetary history is largely a record of the same mistake repeated: currencies debased, confidence spent, empires overextended. Gold is what people have reached for each time. In late 2001 I began buying and reading everything I could find on gold and monetary history, well before there was a company to justify it. I am still on the same pattern, and still helping people act on it.

I founded GoldCore in 2003 and built it into Ireland’s largest gold and silver broker. I sold my shares, resigned as a director and exited in 2020, by which point it had more than 20,000 clients across over 140 countries, over €1 billion in sales and more than €225 million in stored assets. At gold and silver prices today, those precious metals are worth around €3 billion and €675 million.

For over sixteen years I wrote a daily market update on gold, silver, currencies, investments, finance and markets: the discipline of having to say something true about the market every single morning, through bull runs, crashes and long stretches of nothing happening at all. In March 2006 I was named Analyst of the Year at the 13th MoneyMate & Investor Magazine Awards, for warning about the Irish and global property bubble. It was not a popular call at the time.

That work put me in front of most of the financial press — Bloomberg TV, CNBC, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones MarketWatch, the BBC, RTÉ and the Irish Times — and on conference stages in Ireland and abroad. The questions have barely changed in all that time. Currencies lose value, confidence wavers, and people want to know where to put the savings they cannot afford to lose.

After leaving GoldCore I founded Health Wealth Gold, an advisory, consulting and speaking practice for individuals, companies and communities preparing for economic disruption, and for the health and resilience that has to go alongside it. Tara Coins followed in 2022, and Tara Gold AG, in Canton Zug, in 2026. The Swiss company is where the whole pattern ends up: physical gold bullion, fully allocated and fully segregated, held in the client’s own name in a Zürich vault operated by an LBMA Full Member. Specific bars, identified by serial number — not a paper claim, not a fund unit, not a line on someone else’s balance sheet. A quarter of a century watching how ownership quietly fails taught me exactly what to strip out.