What if you bought Gold (oz) in 1990?
Commodities · Metal. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play10.5× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in Gold (oz) at the start of 1990 would be worth about $10,500 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Gold spent the 1990s doing very little, which for a defensive asset is the point, but it still disappointed. Central banks were sellers; the UK famously sold about half its reserves between 1999 and 2002, near the bottom. The price slid to around $250 an ounce, and its nominal high of 1980 was not regained until 2008. Then the narrative turned: a weaker dollar, the arrival of gold ETFs in 2004 that made buying easy, the financial crisis and quantitative easing pushed the price to about $1,900 in 2011.
Rising real interest rates and a stronger dollar cut it back by more than a third by 2015, and it moved sideways for years. The latest leg began after 2022, when Western sanctions froze Russia's central-bank reserves and other central banks, notably China's, began buying gold in volume as an asset nobody can sanction. Inflation, government debt worries and tariff uncertainty did the rest; gold broke $3,000 and then $4,000 in 2025. Over the full period it delivered decent returns, arriving in a few bursts.
The lesson: Gold pays no income, so its returns arrive in rare bursts separated by long droughts; it took almost three decades to regain its 1980 nominal high.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $400 | $10,500 | $19,429 | 10.5× |
| 1995 | $385 | $10,909 | $14,783 | 10.9× |
| 2000 | $290 | $14,483 | $4,626 | 14.5× |
| 2003 | $350 | $12,000 | $7,727 | 12.0× |
| 2005 | $430 | $9,767 | $5,763 | 9.8× |
| 2007 | $630 | $6,667 | $4,789 | 6.7× |
| 2008 | $850 | $4,941 | $4,626 | 4.9× |
| 2010 | $1,100 | $3,818 | $6,071 | 3.8× |
| 2012 | $1,600 | $2,625 | $5,312 | 2.6× |
| 2015 | $1,200 | $3,500 | $3,301 | 3.5× |
| 2018 | $1,300 | $3,231 | $2,519 | 3.2× |
| 2020 | $1,520 | $2,763 | $2,092 | 2.8× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2000, turning $1,000 into $14,483. The S&P 500 from that same year: $4,626.
On this day
- 21 January 1980: Gold spikes to $850 an ounce
- 17 March 1968: The gold pool collapses
- 5 April 1933: FDR orders Americans to hand in their gold
- 20 June 2013: Gold sinks below $1,300 after the Fed's taper talk
- 22 July 1944: Bretton Woods rebuilds the money system
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Gold (oz) is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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