The S&P 500 Is Up 75% In 3 Years. Priced In Gold, It Is Down 14%. Which Is Real?

Which is real? Both, and the gap between them is the interesting part. In dollars, your S&P 500 fund rose about three-quarters in three years. Measured against gold, it lost ground, because gold did even better. We’ll go stock by stock through the biggest names to see who really beat it. Here’s what the pros are actually working on, though: not which ruler is right, but what share of their money would hold its value if the dollar keeps losing ground to hard assets. We’ll come back to that, with a rule you can set this weekend.

That stocks have had a great run. Our price data shows the S&P 500 fund SPY up 75.0% over three years, with dividends, from the close on November 6, 2023, to Friday’s close.

What fewer people notice is that gold did better. Over the same three years, the gold fund GLD rose about 103%. Divide one by the other and the S&P 500, priced in ounces of gold, fell about 14%.

Your bills are in dollars, so the dollar number is the one you live on. If your $100,000 became about $175,000, you can spend $175,000. That’s real.

The gold number answers a different question: how much of that gain came from the companies, and how much from the dollar itself buying less? Gold doesn’t earn anything, and nobody can print more of it. When stocks beat gold, the businesses outran the currency. When gold beats stocks, part of what looked like growth was the measuring stick shrinking. Over the last three years, by this measure, the stick shrank faster than the average business grew.

A simple way to see it on your own statement: take your balance three years ago and today, and divide each by the gold price on those dates. If the number of ounces went down, your money grew in dollars but lost ground against a hard asset. That doesn’t mean you lost money; your groceries are still priced in dollars. It means your plan has been quietly riding on the dollar.

The index is an average, so we did the same sum for ten of its biggest companies. Here’s each one’s three-year return to Friday’s close, in dollars and priced in gold, on Trefis company data:

Five of the ten beat gold. Apple and Meta trailed it slightly, and Amazon, Berkshire and Microsoft lost more ground.

That’s a striking list. Two chip makers did most of the out-running, and both were hit hard on Thursday, when the AI trade unwound: chips and data-center builders fell hardest, after weeks of worry about power supply and growing opposition to new data centers. Nvidia closed at $181.60, down about 9% on the day, while SPY fell 4.4% to $733.00 and GLD rose 0.8%. We flagged power as the AI trade’s real risk on Nov 2, in Nvidia Stock’s Real Risk Isn’t China. It’s Power. And Microsoft, the third-largest U.S. company by market value, lost more than a fifth of its value in gold terms while its sales grew 18% over the past year. Strong businesses can still lose ground to a hard asset if you paid a high price for them.

Three years is a short window, so we went back as far as our gold data goes, to November 2004. Here’s the S&P 500 fund priced in gold, with dividends, on month-end prices:

Over 22 years they finished close. Along the way, each one beat the other by enormous margins for years at a time.

In dollars, SPY grew about 9.3 times and GLD about 8.3 times over the period, roughly 10.7% and 10.1% a year. Gold beat stocks in 11 of the 21 full calendar years from 2005 to 2025. Close to a coin toss year to year, and a near tie over two decades.