Stats › Long run returns › Gold vs stocks
Gold against stocks
Gold or stocks is one of those arguments that never really finishes. One side owns a piece of a business that earns money and pays some of it out. The other owns a metal that sits there, earns nothing, and depends entirely on what the next person will pay for it. Over a long enough period you'd expect those two things to end up in very different places, and they do.
This page runs the comparison from 1928 to 2025, so ninety eight years, using a single dataset that covers stocks, bonds, bills and gold on the same basis. You get what $100 turned into in each, the annual compounding rates, and the odd fact that gold and ten year Treasuries finished within two basis points of each other despite behaving nothing alike along the way.
The reason I wanted to write it up properly is the caveat, which almost every version of this comparison leaves out. For roughly the first forty three of those ninety eight years the gold price was an administrative decision rather than a market price, and Americans mostly weren't allowed to own bullion anyway. That doesn't make the arithmetic wrong, it makes the number mean something different from what people assume. It's one dataset behind everything here, named and linked at the foot of the page. Download it and run the comparison yourself if you want to be sure.
$100 in gold at the start of 1928 became $21,025 by the end of 2025, compounding at 4.78% a year. The same $100 in the S&P 500 became $1,157,599 at 9.79% a year. Gold marginally beat ten year Treasuries at 4.76% and comfortably beat Treasury bills at 3.72%. But the comparison carries a caveat that is almost never stated: for roughly the first forty three years of that period the gold price was set by government policy rather than by a market.
Members only
The rest of this page is for members
Below this point there are 7 sections, 1 chart and 1 named source, roughly 1150 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
You can keep browsing every statistic in the library for free. The intro and the summary are always open.