In a previous post on commodities you might recall that gold came bottom of 16 commodities that we surveyed with an expected annual return of -1.3% a year.
Why So Low?
Below is a price chart for gold for the last 10 years:
As you can see it's pretty much straight up. In fact the annualised 10 year returns on gold are about 20% a year.
Another chart shows gold compared to US GDP since 1970:
As you can see over the last 40 years gold has increased at
a much faster rate than the GDP (although in the late 1990s and early 2000 gold
looked historically cheap). Does this mean gold is expensive now? Maybe. Will
the returns in the future be lower than historical returns? It's more probable.
Over the last 42 years the annualised return on gold has been 9.3% compared
with a 6.7% annual nominal increase in the
GDP of the USA.
Clearly gold has been an excellent investment over the last 10 years but the chances of it being the best investment over the next 10 years looks unlikely to me. Prices seem to have moved beyond rational levels.
Inflation Hedge
Some people argue that gold is a good investment because it's a hedge against inflation. That's true but so are most commodities. The popularity of gold looks a bit overdone and investors looking to hedge against inflation might be better advised to invest in other commodities.
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