Oil futures are trading at prices not seen in more than a decade. But they look even cheaper relative to gold and stocks.

Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist at Convergex, broke down the oil/gold and the oil/S&P 500 ratio in a Friday note. Needless to say, things look extreme.

Convergex

It takes 33.3 barrels of oil CLG26, to buy a troy ounce of gold US:GCG6 ($1,109 divided by $33.27), Colas writes. That’s the highest ratio since 1988 based on month-end averages. It’s also well above the 30-year average of 17.0. That means oil would have to trade at almost double its current $33 level to get in step with its historical price relationship to gold.

Needless to say, the ratio has deviated “meaningfully” from the norm. So is a snapback imminent? Colas found that the ratio’s longest spike over 30 was in 1972-73 at 16 months. Oil was rallying hard back then, but it was outpaced by gold, which soared after U.S. President Richard Nixon took the country off the gold standard in 1971, Colas noted.

How about oil versus stocks? The current ratio of the S&P 500 SPX, -0.84% to oil is 58.4 based on Thursday’s close (1,943 divided by $33.27). That’s well above the 30-year average of 29, Colas notes. The ratio hasn’t been this high since the 1990s tech bubble. In the two years running up to the tech bust, the index traded for more than 60 times a barrel of crude.

The standard deviation of the S&P 500/crude ratio is unusual but not yet truly “anomalous,” Colas writes. That would take a move to 66.2.

But the data does offer up an idea of when oil is cheap relative to stocks on a statistical basis, he noted, putting that level at $29 a barrel. Here’s how he gets there: