Two long climbs that never quite move in step.
Since 1971 both gold and the S&P 500 have climbed enormously. Shown on a log scale — the only honest way to compare percentage moves across decades — they look like two parallel success stories.
But the lower ribbon, their year-to-year together-ness, never sits still. It has swung all the way from about −0.28 (moving opposite, around 1973) to +0.28 (moving in step, around 2020) and back. There is no fixed “gold vs stocks” number — only regimes that come and go.
Note: before 1971 the dollar gold price was fixed by law (1833–1971), so there was no market relationship to measure. The story starts when gold floated.
overview
The relationship is not low. It's unstable.
You’ll often hear that gold and stocks are “uncorrelated.” That number — close to zero on average — is true, and badly misleading. It’s the average of a relationship that swings violently between moving together and moving opposite.
Every model in this section measures the same together-ness a different way. They all reach the same verdict: it moves in persistent moods, it drifts, and it occasionally resets hard.
corr_rolling
corr_dcc
corr_hmm_joint
corr_wavelet_coherence
corr_kalman_beta
corr_copula_tv
corr_regime_switch
corr_changepoints
Sometimes. And it protects by stepping aside, not by fighting back.
The hope is that gold zigs when stocks zag. The data says something quieter: gold mostly just does its own thing. On the days stocks fall hardest, gold tends not to fall with them — that’s the cushion. It protects through decoupling, not opposition.
And that cushion is episodic. Gold held up in inflation and rate-shock bears; it was dragged down in the 2020 cash-grab before recovering. A haven, but a conditional one.
haven_event_study
haven_exceedance_corr
haven_tail_dependence
haven_asym_beta
haven_vol_conditioned
haven_classifier
Almost nothing. And we put that first on purpose.
If gold led stocks (or stocks led gold), you could trade it. So we tested every forecaster the honest way — train on the past, predict the future it hadn’t seen, roll forward, repeat. The benchmark to beat is the dumbest guess there is: “tomorrow looks like today.”
Nothing beats it at a day, a month, or a quarter — the AI models included. The one real edge is subtle, and it isn’t a price call.
backtest_skill_heatmap
predict_leadlag
predict_granger
predict_transfer_entropy
predict_var_vecm
predict_gbm_direction
predict_deepnet
predict_foundation
corr_forecast_skill
crisis_signal_panel
There's an engine under it — the real interest rate.
The relationship isn’t random. The clearest force behind it is the real interest rate — the long bond yield minus inflation. When real rates are high, gold and stocks couple; when they go deeply negative, the two decouple. Inflation flips gold’s character on top of that.
But here’s the honest counterweight: this engine explains the slow lean of the relationship, not its month-to-month swings. Strip the macro state out and the leftover link barely changes.
macro_realrate_corr
macro_inflation_regime
macro_partial_corr
macro_factor_pca
macro_real_overlay
An ordinary mood, in an expensive market.
Putting today through every model: gold and stocks are in their mild mood— their one-year together-ness sits around +0.04, neither a strong hedge nor a strong co-mover. The backdrop is rising inflation with positive real rates.
The unusual part isn’t the relationship — it’s the valuations. Both gold and stocks sit historically rich at the same time. The months that most rhyme with now cluster in late 2004 to early 2006.
state_embedding_analogs
state_conditional_dist
state_current_readout
The honest map.
This is not advice to buy or sell gold or stocks. It is a map of when the two couple, when gold actually protects, and why — and where the pair sits today. Observation, not advice.
No fixed relationship. Their together-ness swings from clearly opposite to clearly in-step and back, in persistent moods. The 'uncorrelated' cliché is a time-average of an unstable, regime-driven process.
Episodic, and it works by decoupling, not opposing. Gold rarely crashes on the same day as stocks (~6%), and on the worst stock days it tends to hold its ground — strongest in inflation and rate-shock bears, weakest in liquidity panics.
Almost none. Nothing beats 'tomorrow looks like today' at short horizons — AI and foundation models included. The one real edge is that the relationship's mood persists, worth about +5% over a naive next-month guess. Not a price call.
The real interest rate is the engine: high real rates couple the two, deeply negative rates decouple them, and hot inflation flips gold's character. But the engine sets the slow lean — it does not author the monthly swings.
Mid-2026: a mild mood (together-ness ~+0.04) against rising inflation and positive real rates, with both gold and stocks historically rich. An ordinary-looking relationship in an expensive market.
- —Two price series (gold and the S&P 500) plus public inflation and interest-rate data. No options, breadth, or flow data.
- —The era is 1971 onward — since gold floated. Before that the dollar gold price was fixed by law, so there was no market relationship to measure.
- —The 'what usually followed' base-rate rests on only ~13 truly independent past episodes. It is a record of what happened, not a validated forecast — and it does not say when.
- —The structural-reset and regime dates are found in hindsight. In real time you'd notice a break only months after it began; this dates resets, it does not warn before the next one.
- —The relationship confirms crises more than it predicts them. Its haven role is conditional — it held up in some crises and fell with stocks in others.
- —Descriptive, not predictive. These models describe what happened; they don't tell you what's next.
Descriptive research, not financial advice. Both gold and the S&P 500 can fall hard and stay down for years — as both have more than once in this dataset.
Appendix — every chart & model inventory →