To Anyone Who’s Still Bullish on Gold:

For some years, I have watched with puzzlement as you held on to gold out of deep affection and conviction.

Gold clearly peaked above $1,900 an ounce back in 2011. Since then, its trend has been down, with a few rallies you must have found reassuring.

But on Monday, gold tumbled to around $1,100 an ounce, its lowest price in five years.

When a stock, market, commodity or currency continues to hit lower lows and lower highs, what do you call it? A bear market.

When that happens year after year, for four years, what do you call that? A secular, or long-term, bear market. The last secular bear market for gold lasted 20 years.

A secular bear is what gold is in now.

The charts tell the story. So do the money flows: Professional and retail investors are fleeing the SPDR Gold Trust GLD, -2.00% like rats from a sinking ship. Its gold holdings have dropped to just above 22 million ounces, the lowest since 2008.

“ Many of you gold bulls are driven by your political beliefs, not a realistic assessment of what’s going on in today’s markets and economy. ”

And yet your intense belief in gold may be preventing this market from hitting bottom and eventually recovering ahead of the next long-term bull. But none of that will happen until you surrender.

As MarketWatch columnist David Weidner pointed out, gold has certain definable up and down periods.

The last secular bull market in gold lasted from August 1971, when President Nixon cut the last ties between gold and the dollar, and January 1980, when it peaked at $850 an ounce.

Gold skyrocketed more than 20-fold in the raucous 1970s bull before plunging down to Earth. It didn’t see the nominal $850 level again for more than a quarter century, and has still not scaled that peak in inflation-adjusted terms.

But starting in 2001, with gold above $250 an ounce, the yellow metal rallied more than 500% to its 2011 all-time price high.

In the 1970s, a loose, inept Federal Reserve, led by Nixon flunky Arthur Burns, allowed the inflation that began during the Vietnam War to get out of control, exacerbated by two oil-price shocks (the oil embargo of 1973 and the 1979 Iranian revolution). But Fed Chairman Paul Volcker killed the gold bull market by raising short-term rates sharply.

In the 2000s, Alan Greenspan’s loose monetary policy inflated a credit and housing bubble just as China’s rise set off a worldwide commodity boom. The subsequent crash and financial crisis triggered a debt explosion as governments tried to save their financial systems and spend their way out of depression.

Global central banks, led by the Fed under Ben Bernanke, dropped short-term interest rates to near zero and embarked on ambitious bond-buying plans, called “quantitative easing,” to jump-start a recovery.

But rather than trying to “monetize” all that debt and thus create hyperinflation, as conspiracy theorists argued, the Fed and other central banks are instead trying to fight deflation and debt crises like those in Greece and other European countries.

That’s what you and prominent gold bulls like Peter Schiff have gotten completely wrong. And yet in a recent MarketWatch interview, Schiff doubled down and said gold could go to $5,000 an ounce.

His outrageous, attention-getting statements, almost completely detached from reality, would make him an ideal vice-presidential running mate for Donald Trump.

And that’s the problem: Many of you gold bulls are driven by your political beliefs, not a realistic assessment of what’s going on in today’s markets and economy.

With a stronger dollar, bear markets in commodities and emerging economies, and rates slated to rise in the United States, what’s the point of owning gold? (Disclosure: I have a very small position in GLD.) But your political views have caused many of you to miss one of the greatest stock bull markets in history.

As gold breaks down near support levels, technician Michael Kahn of barrons.com asks whether capitulation is here. Not quite. After the 1970s bull market, gold lost two-thirds of its value. At this point it has fallen “only” 40% from its 2011 peak. John LaForge, commodities strategist for Ned Davis Research, thinks gold has to fall to $660 before it reaches its bear market bottom.

Shawn Driscoll of T. Rowe Price, who said oil would fall to $50 a barrel, thinks gold will tumble to $800 an ounce.

I’m looking for a bear market bottom somewhere between those two prices. But we can’t get there without you. So please do us all a favor: Give in, raise the white flag, turn in your swords and abandon this lost cause. You would help your country, the markets, and ultimately the price of gold itself.

Trust me, surrender will never feel so sweet.

Sincerely, Howard R. Gold (no relation to the precious metal)

Howard R. Gold is a MarketWatch columnist and founder and editor of GoldenEgg Investing, which offers free market commentary and simple, low-cost, low-risk retirement investing plans. Follow him on Twitter @howardrgold