Totally misleading, S&P with dividends reinvested blows away gold since 1950 or 1971.
S&P 500 Investment (with Dividends Reinvested)
Historical data shows that $10,000 invested in the S&P 500 at the start of 1950, with all dividends reinvested, would grow to approximately $3,836,763 by the end of 2025.
Gold provided pure price appreciation (no yield or dividends). The multiplier is about 124.7× ($4,360 ÷ $35), or an annualized return of roughly 6.8% over 75 years.
Ounces purchased in 1950: $10,000 ÷ $35/oz ≈ 285.71 ounces
It's not very convincing, though: there's a huge runup in gold prices (as is often the case) between 2023 and the present, and a long do-nothing period before that. The major consumers of gold are about: 50% jewelry, 10% industrial, 20% central banks, a large run-up from about 10%.
I like to think about the inherent contradictions of goldbugs going long on central bank portfolio policy: they both tend to distrust the central bank but in a way the central bank activities partially endorse their habits, and are source of their recent appreciation and accusations of "hidden" inflation.
I myself hold no gold, if I want hydraulic and non-volatile inflation compensation, it's quite simple: short-dated sovereign debt, aka the humble money market fund. Nobody likes being a sucker, holding debt for below the time value of money, including changes in nominal value. It finds its level nicely.
As a "measurement of value" they both suck. Gold is (extremely) volatile and currency inflates.
Well, you can't do much to correct for the speculation noise in gold. But maybe we can attack from the other side. Maybe we could record prices for various representative products in a giant data set somewhere and calculate and record, I dunno, a "price index" that normalizes the prices to a value that is stable over time.
I bet people would pay good money to look at a chart like that. Maybe we could find one.
Unfortunately Goodhart's law has rendered official inflation measures borderline useless, as anyone who has been shopping for food for the last decade can tell you.
Taking your example in good faith: Gold is four times as expensive today as it was at this time in 2015. Has food seen a 4x increase? No, right? So gold is volatile on a level way beyond inflation. QED.
Are CPI measurements difficult? Sure. It takes a bunch of expert eggheads and a lot of shouting to come to consensus. Still better than trusting some kind of magical commodity market to tell you.
Oh good. I have a spare spot in my front yard to place it. Or maybe I'll just set it down on my dining room table.
Wait...I might want something more secure than that. And if I have a lot of gold I might need to pay people to protect it. These storage costs are going up.
Great! We can start trading with each other in stock notes. I can't wait to buy my next round of groceries with a 0.1 SPY note! The ones I don't use will pay dividends!
I wonder if this was a 2013 article that linked to live updating charts (with data from 2025) since there are Google+ and Twitter buttons at the end, and two 2013 timestamps below those.
It’s just s&p 500 index value divided by gold to get a “gold native” number. The compounding represented here would be the growth of the companies that has been “compounded” as a result of their internal investment
I sometimes wonder if we should be measuring money in some other unit besides dollar/etc. to reveal inflation. We could report bank balances and wages that way so the effect of inflation is obvious instead of being a trick to silently steal money off people. But it's tricky because there's no natural measure of inflation. Gold seems like a good idea in a way but I don't understand enough to know.
Gold is just one of many commodities these days, mostly unconnected from most monetary systems for many decades. Treating it as the benchmark of value is really quite arbitrary, and I expect someone could compare the S&P to other random commodities and come up with completely different conclusions...
I'd definitely be curious to see the S&P valued in different commodities over time. With that said, gold certainly feels like a special indicator given its history as a universally recognized store of value.
> history as a universally recognized store of value.
History of what now? Gold is a volatile commodity. It has crashed, many times, often catastrophically, and had bear markets that dwarf anything you see in stocks.. A quick search tells me that inflation-adjusted gold prices dropped like 80% between 1979 and 2000.
And given its value right now, it's probably due for another.
I mean, yeah, but the parallels OP is drawing really kinda feel like the lingering whispers of the “gold standard” crowd rather than anything more substantial.
For the working classes, the peak was the dotcom bubble - everything after that has been repeated speculative bubbles attempting to create explosive growth from nothing of substance, as much a deliberate decision of Capital to weaken the working classes while extracting wealth as it was a desperation gambit by an increasingly stable (but not yet stagnant circa mid-2000s) western hemisphere and its governments. Gold alone isn’t an indicator of this, so much as all asset prices skyrocketing to the moon while worker wages remained relatively flat and precarity increased. Metals, securities, housing, land, all of it has appreciated faster than working wages have kept pace, reflecting a siphoning of that wealth into fewer hands.
Gold just makes the story “neater” to tell to folks lamenting the heyday of Breton Woods.
What is the point of this chart? It would make more sense to price in terms of hamburgers or any other reasonably consistent item of real consistent value/utility.
Totally misleading, S&P with dividends reinvested blows away gold since 1950 or 1971.
S&P 500 Investment (with Dividends Reinvested) Historical data shows that $10,000 invested in the S&P 500 at the start of 1950, with all dividends reinvested, would grow to approximately $3,836,763 by the end of 2025.
Gold provided pure price appreciation (no yield or dividends). The multiplier is about 124.7× ($4,360 ÷ $35), or an annualized return of roughly 6.8% over 75 years.
Ounces purchased in 1950: $10,000 ÷ $35/oz ≈ 285.71 ounces
Current value: 285.71 oz × $4,360/oz ≈ $1,246,700
The point of this entire website isn't about gold vs equity as an investment, it's about gold vs fiat currency as a superior measurement of value.
https://pricedingold.com/about/
It's not very convincing, though: there's a huge runup in gold prices (as is often the case) between 2023 and the present, and a long do-nothing period before that. The major consumers of gold are about: 50% jewelry, 10% industrial, 20% central banks, a large run-up from about 10%.
I like to think about the inherent contradictions of goldbugs going long on central bank portfolio policy: they both tend to distrust the central bank but in a way the central bank activities partially endorse their habits, and are source of their recent appreciation and accusations of "hidden" inflation.
I myself hold no gold, if I want hydraulic and non-volatile inflation compensation, it's quite simple: short-dated sovereign debt, aka the humble money market fund. Nobody likes being a sucker, holding debt for below the time value of money, including changes in nominal value. It finds its level nicely.
As a "measurement of value" they both suck. Gold is (extremely) volatile and currency inflates.
Well, you can't do much to correct for the speculation noise in gold. But maybe we can attack from the other side. Maybe we could record prices for various representative products in a giant data set somewhere and calculate and record, I dunno, a "price index" that normalizes the prices to a value that is stable over time.
I bet people would pay good money to look at a chart like that. Maybe we could find one.
Unfortunately Goodhart's law has rendered official inflation measures borderline useless, as anyone who has been shopping for food for the last decade can tell you.
Taking your example in good faith: Gold is four times as expensive today as it was at this time in 2015. Has food seen a 4x increase? No, right? So gold is volatile on a level way beyond inflation. QED.
Are CPI measurements difficult? Sure. It takes a bunch of expert eggheads and a lot of shouting to come to consensus. Still better than trusting some kind of magical commodity market to tell you.
And to be extra fair, we might want to subtract tax from those dividends before reinvestment.
Storing that gold most cost something too.
Storing gold costs nothing but a little space which isn't an issue given how compact it is.
Oh good. I have a spare spot in my front yard to place it. Or maybe I'll just set it down on my dining room table.
Wait...I might want something more secure than that. And if I have a lot of gold I might need to pay people to protect it. These storage costs are going up.
Great! We can start trading with each other in stock notes. I can't wait to buy my next round of groceries with a 0.1 SPY note! The ones I don't use will pay dividends!
you're joking, but this is basically what it means to be retired...
I wonder if this was a 2013 article that linked to live updating charts (with data from 2025) since there are Google+ and Twitter buttons at the end, and two 2013 timestamps below those.
This is a very interesting chart but I can't figure out if it takes compounding into account or not.
It’s just s&p 500 index value divided by gold to get a “gold native” number. The compounding represented here would be the growth of the companies that has been “compounded” as a result of their internal investment
Yes, these charts keep popping up on my Twitter and it's always difficult to know what they are really measuring.
What does this mean? That the valuation of dollar dropped as much as the SP500 growth?
Yes
I sometimes wonder if we should be measuring money in some other unit besides dollar/etc. to reveal inflation. We could report bank balances and wages that way so the effect of inflation is obvious instead of being a trick to silently steal money off people. But it's tricky because there's no natural measure of inflation. Gold seems like a good idea in a way but I don't understand enough to know.
Economic stagnation for over a decade? Aligns with the vibes, IMO.
Gold is just one of many commodities these days, mostly unconnected from most monetary systems for many decades. Treating it as the benchmark of value is really quite arbitrary, and I expect someone could compare the S&P to other random commodities and come up with completely different conclusions...
I'd definitely be curious to see the S&P valued in different commodities over time. With that said, gold certainly feels like a special indicator given its history as a universally recognized store of value.
> history as a universally recognized store of value.
History of what now? Gold is a volatile commodity. It has crashed, many times, often catastrophically, and had bear markets that dwarf anything you see in stocks.. A quick search tells me that inflation-adjusted gold prices dropped like 80% between 1979 and 2000.
And given its value right now, it's probably due for another.
Not really. Gold is not a random commodity. It is historically the primary compact store of value, only recently to meet competition with Bitcoin.
I mean, yeah, but the parallels OP is drawing really kinda feel like the lingering whispers of the “gold standard” crowd rather than anything more substantial.
For the working classes, the peak was the dotcom bubble - everything after that has been repeated speculative bubbles attempting to create explosive growth from nothing of substance, as much a deliberate decision of Capital to weaken the working classes while extracting wealth as it was a desperation gambit by an increasingly stable (but not yet stagnant circa mid-2000s) western hemisphere and its governments. Gold alone isn’t an indicator of this, so much as all asset prices skyrocketing to the moon while worker wages remained relatively flat and precarity increased. Metals, securities, housing, land, all of it has appreciated faster than working wages have kept pace, reflecting a siphoning of that wealth into fewer hands.
Gold just makes the story “neater” to tell to folks lamenting the heyday of Breton Woods.
I’d be interested to see a similar chart for silver.
What is the point of this chart? It would make more sense to price in terms of hamburgers or any other reasonably consistent item of real consistent value/utility.
The site is trying to find evidence for retvrning to the gold standard.
Now do it compared to the median home value.