Is Gold a Good Investment?…

Gold: Summary

A hedge is an asset that drops when another asset rises, or the reverse (rises when another drops). Some maintain that when stocks drop, gold rises. If you want to beat inflation, buy gold. Is any of that true?

Question: Does gold outperform stocks and housing? Answer: Gold beats housing but not stocks. See Table 1.

Question: Does gold outperform inflation? Answer: Only half the time. See Table 2.

Question: Is gold a good hedge against stocks? Answer: No. See Table 3.

Gold: Is Gold a Good Hedge?

I downloaded publicly available data from various sources to check the performance of gold bullion, houses, and the stock market from 1972 to 2022.

Table 1 shows how the various components performed over the 50 years. For each year, I computed the return from the prior year and calculated the average, median (the midrange value in a sorted
list of numbers) and total increase over time (the sum of the return each year).

For example, inflation averaged 3.9% over the 50 years, the median value was 3.1%, and the sum of each year, was 195.7%. That row serve as the benchmark. As investors and traders, we want to select
investments that will beat inflation so we can grow our money.

In last place is housing after the cost of ownership is factored in. What are those costs? Homeowners association dues, mortgage interest, property taxes, maintenance, and so on. A reference cited
later found that 5% of a home’s annual value is a good number for the cost of homeownership. I adjusted the market value of a home each year downward by 5% to factor in those costs.

• Housing makes for a bad investment compared to inflation.

In case you don’t like the 5% cost-of-ownership number, I show the return without costs in the next line. This is unrealistic, but if you didn’t have to pay for termite damage or foundation repair or a new roof
or plumbing repairs or anything else that crops up from time to time when owning a home, you’d exceed the cost of inflation against the average, median, and sum.

The next line is the price appreciation of gold over 50 years. The return from gold exceeds inflation by about double. That’s good.

The next to last line in Table 1 shows the total return (price plus dividends) of the Standard and Poor’s 500 index.
Finally, the last line shows the Nasdaq composite. This is not total return but the price return over 50 years. If we were to add in dividends, we would likely beat the S&P 500s index.
The Nasdaq returns about three times the rate of inflation, and that’s very good.

• Is gold a good hedge? Answer: It beats housing and it beats inflation, but the stock market outperforms gold.

The GLD prospectus (SPDR Gold Trust exchange traded fund) says that during the 2008 financial crises, individuals sold gold and drove down the price. I looked at the data and found that during what’s called
the Great Recession, from December 2007 to June 2009, the price of gold climbed 17%. However from the start of the crises to gold’s monthly low in November 2008, gold dropped 6%.

Gold: Performance versus Inflation

Table 2 shows how the various elements compared to inflation on a year by year basis. In other words, I conducted 50 annual contests and compared the inflation for that year with the associated investment (gold,
house, S&P, and Nasdaq).

The table shows that when costs are included with housing, the value of a house only beats inflation 27% of the time.

• Owning a home is not an inflation hedge.

The winner of this table, is the total return of the S&P 500 index, which beats the annual rate of inflation 73% of the time. My guess is that if dividends are included in the Nasdaq composite, it might be the winner.

• The Nasdaq composite or total return from the S&P 500 index are much better at fighting inflation than are gold and housing.

Gold: Performance of Gold versus Stocks

Is gold really a good hedge against stock movement? By that, I mean if stocks rise does gold fall? If stocks fall, does gold rise? Table 3 shows what I found using data from 1969 (not 72, so it’s 3 years
longer than the other tables).

If you add the cells together, we find that gold tracks stocks either both up or both down 59% of the time. They go against the trend 41% of the time.

In other words, gold moves in concert with the S&P 500 index, not against it.

• Gold is not a good hedge against stock movement.

— Thomas Bulkowski

See Also

Here are the data sources I used. I don’t link to them because they can break over time, but if they still exist, you can visit the site and poke around.

• Inflation: From https://www.worlddata.info/america/usa/index.php
• Monthly gold price: https://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=gold&months=240
• Yearly gold prices: https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-year-chart
• Housing prices: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ASPUS
• S&P 500 index: https://www.slickcharts.com/sp500/returns