This morning I glanced over at the stock market

S&P 500 Futures, “/ES”

I wondered how the chart would look priced in gold as opposed to US Dollars. On the ThinkOrSwim platform, you can write your own studies in a language called ThinkScript. The script is easy enough:

input symbol1 = { default "/ES" };

input symbol2 = { default "/GC" };

plot Data = close( symbol1 ) / close( symbol2 );

More generally, to view your current stock divided by another symbol, with gold as the default, one could write:

input symbol = { default "/GC" };

plot Data = close( getSymbol() ) / close( symbol );

Results

S&P 500 Priced in Gold

That huge run up around the “Dot Com” bubble still sticks out. Next, thinking about said bubble, I was curious about NASDAQ 100. Here is the chart in Dollars:

Nasdaq 100 (“NDX”) in US Dollars

The chart in gold:

Nasdaq 100 Priced in Gold

Priced in gold, it doesn’t appear like there is all that much action here since the “Dot Com” bubble. So what about Real Estate? For this I used IYR, the iShares Real Estate ETF.

IYR Priced in Dollars

Give or take in the real estate / housing recovery priced in dollars — this seems about right, at least looking at real estate values around town or on Zillow. A huge run about leading into 2007, then a crash, then another massive run up. So here is the chart of this real estate ETF priced in gold

IYR priced in Gold

Next I took a look at the bond market. There has been a lot of talk about bonds going parabolic — a cycle where central banks signal lower interest rates followed by speculative cash piled on top of bond buying programs to keep bond rates low has resulted in quite a run. Here is TLT, the iShares Barclays 20+ Yr. Bond ETF.

TLT Priced in Dollars

Here is TLT in priced in gold

TLT Priced in Gold

This one is interesting. First, let me state that the bond market is huge. Way bigger than the gold market. Second, I could totally be missing the point here. Anyway, it seems that relative to supply, gold has seen more demand than bonds — that as a safe haven, while surely the bond market is far greater, gold has been as popular as always. Maybe this is a case of the “Law of Large Numbers” or maybe it’s gold that is in a bubble. I don’t know.

Of course I was now wondering about the price of Crude Oil. Here is the futures symbol “/CL” priced in Dollars:

Crude Oil in Dollars

Here it is priced in gold:

Crude Oil in Gold

What is interesting to me about this chart is that priced in gold, oil seems to be more affordable now than when it was trading in the low $10’s in the late 90's.

Finally, here is gold priced in Dollars:

Gold in US Dollars

The contrarian in me is worried about this chart — that isn’t to say I’m feeling cozy about stocks, bonds, or real estate either.

If I had to guess what is going on here, gold has benefitted from the perception of instability in the markets; coupled with a real shift in the fundamentals of our economy.