Spoiler alert: at the end of the book Old Yeller dies.



Alas some investors in the old yellow metal might consider the dog’s fate a decent alternative to what’s happened to their portfolios of late. After more than a decade of doing nothing but move higher annually, physical gold and the SPDR Gold Shares ETF (GLD) got destroyed in 2013. For good measure the Market Vectors Gold Miner ETF (GDX) () got even more walloped, and has lost more than half its value over the last 52-weeks.



That’s neither a forecast nor prediction. Just the facts. Those few remaining metal bulls looking for solace should stop reading now or avoid the attached video because Bob Doll of Nuveen is about to say things only serious contrarians are going to want to hear.



“Real interest rates are going up, the U.S. economy is improving, we’re in an environment where a return to normalcy is the course of the day. None of this is supportive of gold.”



The other problem facing the gold bugs from where Doll sits is that inflation just didn’t explode the way so many expected when the Fed got the printing presses cranked up in response to the 2008 crisis. Perhaps inflation should have happened. It’s simply very hard to find inflation at the moment, and with a taper happening time isn’t on the gold bugs’ side.



Doll has some closing advice for gold investors: “If somebody has gold in a tiny little corner of their portfolio for insurance purposes, my hope for them is that gold doesn’t do well because everything else in their portfolio probably is going to do well. It’s a hedge. It’s insurance. Have a tiny corner, at most.”





















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