Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Fun with Gold Part 1

I was reading this column yesterday, which described a number of items you may have not known about gold. That got me thinking. What can the price of gold tell us about the broader market or the economy? And I remembered a line that a trader I used to work with proclaimed. He has said a number of times and believed that the price of gold leads the broader equity market up or done. So does it? I thought I would test this theory and see if it works.

Cutting to the case, it doesn't. That is at least as far as I can tell. I ran a few different scenarios to try discern this, but I think the below two graphs tell the story. The first is the 6-month return of the S&P 500 and the gold since January 2000.

6-Month Rolling Daily Return


1-Year Rolling Daily Return


Just looking at the daily returns it appears there is little to no relationship between the two data sets. However, looks can be deceiving and I thought I would run some statistics. Well, the statistics are no better. The correlation between the two sets show little to no relationship, as the 6-month rolling return correlation is just 13% while the 1-year return is better at 28%. Additionally, I ran lagged R-squared statistics to see if gold can provide some insight into the future performance of the S&P 500. Without going into all the R-squared stats, the best measure I calculated was just 7%.

It appears that gold prices provide little to no insight into the future path of the broader equity market.


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