GoldNuggets — Gold vs Commodities

GoldNuggets Digest: investor perceptions of gold, gold price vs commodities (and consumer sentiment), gold vs Buffett, mining stock M&A trends...

May 11, 2025

The GoldNuggets Digest is our free publication. It contains "nuggets" of Charts & Research that come across our desk on gold and investing which we think might be interesting and useful for investors.

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Investment Perceptions

Mining.com reports: “Gold has surpassed equities as the second most popular long-term investment choice amongst Americans, according to the latest poll by Gallup“ (source)
Not quite ‘safe as houses‘, but getting closer to it. Very interesting snapshot of sentiment here (and quite the contrast for gold vs crypto).

Gold Performance vs Consumer Sentiment

Jim Paulsen remarks: "The greatest risk to gold investors is a breakout of Happiness! Should the tariff war wind down and the Fed cuts interest rates in a slow growing but sustained expansion, pessimism will finally ease, and the price of gold will sink." (source)
(in other words, if consumer sentiment rebounds it would imply based on the albeit tenuous relationship in this chart that gold would start to underperform vs commodities…)

Commodities vs Gold

On that note, here’s an old favorite chart of mine — it shows the equal-weighted price index of commodities ex-gold, and the ratio of that index vs the gold price. There seems to be a pattern here of extreme underperformance by the rest of commodities vs gold (highlighted yellow) being a bottoming/cyclically bullish signal for commodities. (source)
So maybe the real takeaway on these two charts is: bullish commodities.

Buffett vs Gold

Here’s one perspective: “Buffett is the single-greatest asset allocator in the history of financial markets. Yet when you tally up the score, all Buffett essentially did was match the performance of gold over the past 25 years.“ (source)
It’s an interesting chart and goes to show that sometimes asset allocation is more important than just being a good stock picker… but I would also caution that with these sort of charts the (choice of) starting point can make a big difference in the picture and narrative.

Miner M&A

Robert Sinn shares that: “gold mining M&A is picking up again with a slew of pre-production acquisitions in the last 12 months.“ (source)
Makes sense given the surge in gold price and desire to boost production to cash-in on that, but also the notoriously low valuations for the sector and apparent investor apathy on mining stocks.