John Murillo, Chief Business Officer von B2BROKER – Interviewreihe

John Murillo is a capital markets professional with 20+ years of experience in trading, liquidity, and portfolio risk across forex, equities, commodities, and digital assets. As Chief Business Officer at B2BROKER, he develops multi-asset liquidity solutions for brokers and institutions, connecting market infrastructure with strategy, risk management, and margin design.

He previously held senior roles in broker-dealer and trading environments, managing dealing desks and institutional risk systems. His work focuses on market structure, macro-driven volatility, cross-asset dynamics, and the role of gold and safe-haven assets in portfolio resilience and hedging, translating complex market mechanisms into practical investment insights.

B2BROKER is a global fintech solutions provider for financial institutions. It delivers liquidity, trading technology, payment solutions, and brokerage infrastructure through a network of specialized entities. Founded in 2014, with key hubs in London, Limassol, Hong Kong and Dubai, the company operates in 11 countries, serving clients across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. B2BROKER serves brokers, exchanges, hedge funds, proprietary trading firms, and other financial institutions. Leveraging its extensive network and ecosystem-driven approach, the company provides scalable solutions that help clients streamline operations, maximise efficiency, and drive growth.

You have spent more than 20 years across capital markets and now work closely with institutional liquidity and risk. From an investor’s perspective, how has the role of gold in portfolios evolved compared with earlier eras dominated by forex and stocks?

First of all, gold’s role has evolved from a passive hedge into an active structural element of portfolios. In earlier market cycles dominated by equities and forex, gold was often treated as a kind of external insurance policy — allocated separately and revisited mainly during crises. Today, given all the ongoing disruptive changes, it increasingly operates inside integrated trading environments where equities, currencies, commodities, and digital assets coexist within a single risk and liquidity framework.

The rise of “super-app” financial platforms further reinforces this transformation. When all instruments are accessed under one roof, gold becomes part of continuous portfolio optimization rather than a static defensive allocation. It functions simultaneously as a hedge, collateral, and a liquidity tool.

As a result, gold is no longer a tool of traders’ reaction to increased volatility. It has become a dynamic instrument that reflects how capital moves across asset classes in real time, which is why my general advice to asset managers is to rethink its strategic importance in modern portfolios.

As gold increasingly trades inside unified, multi-asset environments, what changes for investors when gold exposure is managed alongside equities, forex, and digital assets rather than in isolation?

The most important change, to my mind, is that gold today has taken on the role of an active portfolio component. It becomes embedded in the same liquidity, margin, and risk frameworks as equities, currencies, and digital assets, which fundamentally changes how capital is allocated and protected.

Gold no longer responds only to conventional dangers such as inflation, central bank action, or geopolitical shocks. Lately, its behavior has been increasingly reflecting cross-asset correlations and funding ampleness. In stressed markets like we’re seeing now, it can offset margin pressure and release liquidity, while in stable periods, it contributes to portfolio efficiency rather than simply sitting as insurance.

In such structures, gold can amplify or dampen portfolio dynamics depending on market conditions. It may serve as collateral, a liquidity buffer, or a tactical risk instrument rather than a purely defensive asset. The result is a more functional, but also more complex, role for gold within modern investment architectures.

During periods of market stress, how does gold liquidity actually behave relative to stocks or forex when margin and risk are shared across asset classes?

In stressful conditions, gold liquidity tends to behave differently from both equities and major currencies, especially in unified margin environments. Rather than simply rising as a safe haven, gold often becomes a source of balance within the broader risk system.

For example, equities usually experience liquidity contraction and widening spreads, while forex remains relatively liquid but largely directional, being greatly influenced by funding and policy expectations. As a result, gold sits somewhere in-between: it often retains tradability when stocks deteriorate, yet avoids the extreme pro-cyclicality seen in some currency pairs.

When margin is shared across asset classes, gold can absorb pressure rather than amplify it. It may be used to stabilize portfolios, offset margin calls, or reallocate risk without forcing liquidation elsewhere. This makes gold less of a panic asset and more of a structural shock absorber.

Many investors view gold as a stabilizer. In practice, does unified margining strengthen or weaken gold’s effectiveness as a portfolio hedge?

Basierend auf meiner Erfahrung, unified margining both enhances and complicates gold’s role as a hedge at the same time.

On one side, shared margin frameworks enable gold to more effectively offset risk across different asset classes. When volatility jumps in equities or currencies, gold positions can help alleviate overall portfolio stress and free up collateral, reinforcing its stabilizing role.

On the flip side, this integration alters behavior under pressure. Since all assets rely on the same liquidity pool, sudden shifts in one market can lead to margin calls elsewhere, forcing investors to rebalance or, sometimes, liquidate positions they would otherwise hold — and that includes gold, too. In moments like those, gold behaves less like a standalone safe haven and more like a component of a broader liquidity mechanism.

Capital efficiency is often cited as a major benefit of multi-asset platforms. From an allocation standpoint, where does this genuinely improve returns or risk-adjusted performance, and where can it backfire?

Platforms offering multi-asset environments clearly improve capital and traders’ efficiency by allowing positions to share margin and collateral across asset classes. Such versatility can also enhance risk-adjusted returns by freeing capital for occasional unexpected opportunities and for lowering portfolio volatility as a whole. Based on the Efficient Frontier portfolio theory, mixing assets like gold, forex, and equities can offset each other’s risks in real time, which is what makes the difference at the end of the day.

However, the same structure can backfire under different circumstances. Capital efficiency works best when risk, correlations, and liquidity are actively managed; without careful oversight, unified platforms can turn what should be a stabilizing architecture into a source of systemic vulnerability.

How should institutional investors think differently about position sizing and leverage for gold when capital is dynamically allocated across multiple asset classes?

Once again, nothing should be taken as granted — especially during periods of market stress. When capital is dynamically allocated across multiple asset classes, traditional rules for gold position sizing and leverage need to be reconsidered. In such cases, gold doesn’t act as a standalone hedge; it becomes subject to overall portfolio risk and liquidity in real time. This requires a completely different risk approach.

Investors must be able to evaluate how gold correlates with equities, currencies, and digital assets under unified margining and within selected time frames. Position sizes should mirror cross-asset correlations. At the same time, traders must realistically assess funding flexibility and potential margin offsets rather than sticking to predetermined allocation targets. 

Finally, leverage should be applied with an eye on systemic exposure. Gold can buffer and even offset stress, but excessive leverage across the portfolio can undermine that stabilizing effect.

The key strategy here is to treat gold not as a fixed allocation, but as an active tool within a holistic portfolio framework.

In multi-asset portfolios, do investors tend to overestimate gold’s liquidity in fast markets, or underestimate its correlation to broader risk events?

On paper, gold is deep and global, but during stress events, liquidity fragments very quickly across futures, ETFs, physical markets, and OTC flows. Then we see a typical picture: bid–ask spreads widen, futures can decouple from spot prices, and the ability to move size without impact is dropping faster than many portfolio models predict. 

At the same time, gold’s correlation is often misread as static. In real risk-off events, it can briefly correlate with equities as investors sell what they can, not what they want, especially when margin calls and dollar funding stress dominate the tape.

Comparisons between gold and so-called “digital gold” are common. From an investor’s perspective, what do these narratives misunderstand about liquidity, drawdowns, and exit risk?

The “digital gold” narrative tends to oversimplify what actually matters to investors under stress. Gold and crypto behave very differently when it comes to drawdowns and exits. 

Crypto markets are structurally more continuous and accessible, but that doesn’t mean they offer cleaner exits in size during systemic events. Liquidity can vanish abruptly, volatility spikes are nonlinear, and forced liquidations amplify moves. 

What these comparisons usually miss is that gold’s value proposition is stability over cycles, while crypto’s is optionality and convexity. Treating them as substitutes for one another rather than instruments with very different liquidity regimes and risk profiles leads to poor allocation decisions.

When investors are deciding between gold, bonds, equities, or crypto as a hedge, what mistakes do you most often see in how they assess downside protection and timing?

The most common mistake is assuming that a hedge is defined by the asset class rather than by timing, sizing, and the specific risk being hedged. Investors often buy gold, bonds, or crypto too late, after volatility has already repriced protection, and then judge the hedge as “not working.” 

Another frequent error is confusing downside protection with negative correlation at all times. In reality, true protection is about performance during specific stress windows, not over long-term averages. Without clarity on whether the risk is inflation-, growth-, liquidity-, or policy-driven, even the right instrument can fail to deliver when it’s actually needed.

Looking ahead, do you expect gold to remain a core strategic allocation, or to become more of a tactical asset as unified trading environments reshape how capital moves across markets?

Honestly, I don’t see this as a binary choice. In fact, as trading environments become more unified, gold will occupy both roles simultaneously.

Strategically, gold is unlikely to lose its core place in portfolios, even as market sentiment occasionally swings in favour of Bitcoin, seeking similar protection. What’s worth remembering is that gold’s unique capacity to store value has been known and proven over centuries. 

I think the integration of asset classes into shared liquidity and margin frameworks actually reinforces gold’s long-term relevance and strategic function. When capital moves faster and correlations shift more dynamically, investors need an anchor that is not fully absorbed by the logic of any single market. As gold continues to serve in that capacity, it looks very natural as a core component of general portfolio architecture.

At the same time, unified environments inevitably make gold more tactical in practice. As noted earlier, gold is difficult to replace as an active portfolio tool. This is largely due to its embedded, well-tested real-time risk, liquidity, and collateral protection mechanisms. Together, these features make gold particularly effective for rebalancing, margin optimization, and cross-asset risk management. Consequently, as we already covered, gold is being repositioned from just a passive store of value and into an active portfolio component that investors integrate dynamically.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more about this company should visit B2BROKER.