I've never been a goldbug and I actually set out to quickly disprove that gold was a good alternative to stocks during and in the leadup to recessions.
So I made a table with the returns of the S&P 500 and the gold spot price during recessionary periods and in the year leading up to those periods…
https://i.imgur.com/LF3fT5x.png
I was surprised and delighted to find out that my thesis was wrong.
The S&P 500 does pretty terribly during recessions (nothing new there) and returns are middling/mixed in the runup to a recession (-8.1%/+3.6% on average, respectively). What surprised me was gold. Generally positive but middling performance during a recession (+4% on average). But gold absolutely trounced the market in the year before a recession–up 35.6% on average.
Super non-rigorous analysis, I know, and I welcome any criticism.
But uh, yeah… I ain't betting the farm on shiny rocks, but I think I'm going to go long $IAU until all the macroeconomic turmoil passes.
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