A new gold-led cycle may have started in April 2024, while US equities still appear historically expensive on metrics such as CAPE and the Buffett Indicator. Our research shows that precious metals may still be early in a long relative outperformance phase versus stocks. Most investors still look at gold and silver the wrong way. They treat them as trades instead of a cycle.
What you will learn in our research?
The central argument is simple: the real signal is not the nominal gold price, but the relationship between gold and equities. Since April 2024, the Gold-to-Dow ratio has broken out of the trend that defined the 2013–2024 period, suggesting that a new precious-metals cycle may have begun. In the framework used here, previous gold-led cycles lasted roughly 11 to 15 years. If that template holds, this move is not mature. It is early.
That matters because the other side of the trade looks stretched: Shiller CAPE near 39, a Buffett Indicator around 216%, and an exceptionally high equity allocation in US household portfolios, while gold ETF ownership remains unusually small. In other words, capital is still heavily positioned for financial assets and only marginally positioned for monetary protection. That is exactly the kind of imbalance that tends to define the beginning of a major rotation, not the end of one.
The implication is not that gold or silver must rise in a straight line, and it is certainly not a blind endorsement of extreme price targets. Our research’s own fact-check explicitly says that targets such as $20,000 gold and $500 silver are highly speculative, and that using CAPE below 10 as a final switch back into equities is historically grounded but probably an extreme hurdle, but direction holds. The strongest part of the thesis is not the headline target. It is the relative-value argument: if equities are still priced for perfection while the Gold-to-Dow cycle has already turned, precious metals may still have a long runway relative to stocks.
So the real takeaway is this: the sell decision is not today’s problem. According to the framework in the piece, you sell gold and silver only when the Gold-to-Dow uptrend breaks and equities have become genuinely cheap again. Until then, the burden of proof is on anyone claiming the move is already over.
