How do you measure the value of gold?
"Gold may have some ""intrinsic value"" but it cannot be accurately determined by investors by any known valuation techniques. In fact, if you were to apply the dividend discount model of John Burr Williams - a variation of which is the basis of Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) analysis and the basis of most valuation techniques - gold would have zero intrinsic value because it produces no cash flow. Legendary focus investor Warren Buffett argues that investing in gold is pure speculation because of the reason mentioned above. As others have mentioned, gold prices are affected by supply and demand, but the bigger influence on the price of gold is how the economy is. Gold is seen as a store of value because, according to some, it does not ""lose value"" unlike paper currency during inflation. In inflationary times, demand increases so gold prices do go up, which is why gold behaves similar to a commodity but has far less uses.  It is difficult to argue whether or not gold gains or loses value because we can't determine the intrinsic value of gold, and anyone who attempts to justify any given price is pulling blinders over your eyes. It is indisputable that, over history, gold represents wealth and that in the past century and the last decade, gold prices rise in inflationary conditions as people dump dollars for gold, and it has fallen when the purchasing power of currency increases. Many investors have talked about a ""gold bubble"" by arguing that gold prices are inflated because of inflation and the Fed's money policy and that once interest rates rise, the money supply will contract and gold will fall, but again, nobody can say with any reasonable accuracy what the fair value of gold at any given point is.  This article on seeking alpha: http://seekingalpha.com/article/112794-the-intrinsic-value-of-gold gives a quick overview, but it is also vague because gold can't be accurately priced.  I wouldn't say that gold has zero intrinsic value because gold is not a business so traditional models are inappropriate, but I would say that gold *certainly * doesn't have a value of $1,500 and it's propped so high only because of investor expectation.  In conclusion, I do not believe you can accurately state whether gold is undervalued or overvalued - you must make judgments based on what you think about the future of the market and of monetary policy, but there are too many variables to be accurate consistently." "There are three aspects of what to value gold over. It doesn't easily chemically react with anything, so it stays pure over a long period of time (vs, say a bar of iron or a bar of butter).  So it's valuable so far as it doesn't rot. It is shiny, and there is the historical allure of having a bag of shiny, jingly gold coins. Other people will give you other items of perceived value in exchange for it. I believe it was Warren Buffett who stated his opinion on gold - paraphrased such: ""You pay people to dig it out of the ground, you pay people to purify it and pour into forms, you pay people to verify the number of nine's purity in it, you pay people to build a secure building to store it in, and you pay people to stand around and guard it.  Where is the value in that?""" "Intrinsic value is a myth.  There is no such thing.  Subjective human demand is the only thing that gives anything value.  This subjectivity is different person to person and can change very quickly. Historically there are two main uses for gold: jewelry and money.  How can you tell when a particular type of money is undervalued?  It disappears from circulation since people prefer to use money that is overvalued.  This phenomenon is paraphrased in Gresham's Law: Bad money drives out good money. The Coinage Act of 1792 established the US dollar as 371.25 grains of silver or 24.75 grains of gold.  This established a government ratio of 15 ounces of silver to 1 ounce of gold.  In the late 18th century there was a large production of silver from Mexico and the market ratio of silver to gold increased to 15.75 to 1 by 1805.  The government ratio, however, was still 15 to 1.  This was enough incentive for people to exchange their silver coins for gold coins at the government ratio, melt the gold, and sell the gold bullion overseas at the market value.  Thus, gold coins disappeared from circulation as people either hoarded the gold or sent it abroad.  People used the overvalued silver coins (i.e. the ""bad"" money) domestically and gold coins disappeared from the market. In an attempt to correct the problem of disappearing gold coins the Coinage Act of 1834 was enacted.  It kept the US dollar at 371.25 grains of silver but changed the definition to 23.2 grains of gold which established a government ratio of 16 to 1.  This was close to the market ratio of gold to silver at the time so both gold and silver coins appeared in circulation again.  The gold rush of 1849 produced a lot of gold and the market ratio of silver to gold became 15.46 to 1.  Now gold was overvalued so people began exchanging their gold coins for silver coins at the government ratio, melt the silver, and sell the silver bullion overseas at the market value.  People used the overvalued gold coins (i.e. the ""bad"" money) domestically and silver coins disappeared from the market. When you see gold circulating everywhere you will know it is overvalued compared to other types of money.  Paper money always drives gold out of circulation since the market ratio of paper to gold severely under values gold. Source here." "1) Get some gold. 2) Walk around, yelling, ""Hey, I have some gold, who wants to buy it?"" 3) Once you have enough interested parties, hold an auction and see who will give you the most dollars for it. 4) Trade the gold for that many dollars. 5) You have just measured the value of your gold." "I can describe the method for determining a price floor, which may help. It starts with looking at the cost of mining. There's a ridiculously small amount of gold in the best ore, so it's measured in tonnes of ore to produce a given ounce of gold. Mines will only operate at a loss for so long, so for any mine which focuses on gold, when the price of gold is below that price for long enough, the mine will cease operation. Since not all mines have the same cost, the supply will not appear as a step function, it will reduce slowly as mines close.  ""Gold Drops Below Cash Cost, Approaches Marginal Production Costs"" offers a marginal cost of production just over $1100. This is not a floor price, as the market can act irrationally at times. It's just a number to consider.  On the demand side, the industrial use (I am thinking gold plating in electronics manufacturing) will serve to provide demand almost regardless of price. When a $100 microprocessor uses say 10 cents worth of gold (at $300/oz) $1500 gold increases the final chip price by 1/2%. The industry is still trying to move away from Gold where they can, but that's a long process.  As far as a ceiling goes, I highly recommend the book Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds which offers insight on a number of mania that have occurred not just in the past few decades, but over the centuries. At $1500/oz, the value of all the gold in the world is about US$7.5trillion (That's 12 zeros). Given that a portion of it is in jewelry and not available as an investment, it's safe to say that the entire world can only easily bid on about 1/3 of this (as the gold council cites 31% of gold going towards investments each year vs 57% jewelry and 11% industrial) or US$2.5T or so. With total world wealth at US$125T it would take a bit more hysteria to push gold from its current 2% of that value (funny how that number lined up perfectly) to much higher.  Note: I provided a number of links, as it's too easy to just throw numbers around. See the links and provide more current data if you're so inclined. Data isn't real time." You acquire something because you expect to use it, or because you expect to exchange it for something that you want to use. Gold is a good candidate for storing value because it's rare, it's not easily counterfeited, it's divisible, it's portable, etc.  Contrast this with your favorite currency:  more can be printed up almost at will, etc. Overvaluedness/undervaluedness is only in reference to something else.  How many dollars does it take to buy an ounce of gold?  (About $1,500.)  How many ounces does it take to equal the DJIA?  (About 8.)  How many ounces of silver does it take to buy an ounce of gold?  How many barrels of oil can you buy with an ounce of gold?  Etc., etc. But whatever measure you're using, the value of the gold you have is directly related to the mass of gold you own.  Two ounces are twice as valuable as one ounce. As the old joke goes (no offense to taxi drivers intended!) when your cabbie starts talking about how to get rich with gold, it's probably overvalued.  Sell it all! ;) There is no such thing as intrinsic value. Gold has value because it is rare and has a market. If any of those things decline, the value plunges. The question of whether gold is overvalued or not is complicated and depends on a lot of factors.  The key question in my mind is: Is gold more valuable in terms of US dollars because it is becoming more valuable, or because the value of US dollars, the prevailing medium of exchange, is declining? "We measure the value of gold by comparing it to other things. Sorry, but there is no better answer than that. There is no gold standard (pun intended) by which objects can be measured in value because ""value"" is a subjective term. It would be comparable to asking how funny is an object. Different objects are funny to different people. Even if we gathered all the really ""funny"" object together, there is no guaranty those objects would be funny next year - unless we all agreed they were as part of a social contract. Which is basically what we do with currency. While gold does not need a social contract in order for it to retain its value, this is only because it is has been (1) very useful and (2) rare. If either of these two factors change, the value of gold will change - which it has on several occasions. WARRING: Rant about ""Intrinsic Value"" of gold below. Gold has no ""intrinsic"" value. None whatsoever.  ""Intrinsic value"" makes just as much sense as a ""cat dog"" animal. ""Dog"" and ""cat"" are referring to two mutually exclusive animals, therefore a ""cat dog"" is a nonsensical term. Intrinsic Value: ""The actual value of a company or an asset based on an underlying perception of its true value ..."" Intrinsic value is perceived, which means it is worth whatever you, or a group of people, think it is. Intrinsic value has nothing, I repeat, absolutely nothing, to do with reality.  The most obvious example of this is the purchase of a copy-right. You are assigning an intrinsic value to a copy-right by purchasing it. However, when you purchase a copy-right you are not buying ink on a page, you are purchasing an idea. Someone's imaginings that, for all intensive purposes, doesn't even exist in reality! By definition, things that do not exist do not have ""intrinsic"" properties - because things that don't exist, don't have any natural properties at all. ""Intrinsic"" according to Websters Dictionary:  ""Belonging to the essential nature or constitution of a thing ... (the intrinsic brightness of a star)."" An intrinsic property of an object is something we know that exists because it is a natural property of that object. Suns emit light, we know this because we can measure the light coming from it. It is not subjective. ""Intrinsic Value"" by definition is the OPPOSITE of ""Intrinsic"""
It helps to put the numbers in terms of an asset. Say a bottle of wine costs 10 dollars, but the price rises to 20 dollars a year later. The price has risen 100%, and your dollars have lost value. Whereas your ten used to be worth 100% of the price of bottle of wine, they now are worth 50% of the risen price of a bottle of wine so they've lost around 50% of their value. Divide the old price by the new inflated price to measure proportionally how much the old price is of the new price. 10 divided by 20 is 1/2 or .50 or 50%. You can then subtract the old price from the new in proportional terms to find how much value you've lost. 1 minus 1/2 or 1.00 minus .50 or 100% minus 50%. Excellent explanation. Upvote to you sir. I would like to add something:  How do we know how many bushels of apples is worth a chunk of deer meat?   You did not touch on the concept of value.  The way I see it, value is related to the human energy required to procure a specific good.   For example: it takes a man all day to find a nugget of gold, while it take another man all day to pick 20 bushels of apples. Because gold is scarce, it is worth a lot of apples: it has a high value.   At it's core, value is assigned based on the amount of human labor required to acquire a good or service.   For example: Many years ago there may have been an equal number of bears and skunks. However, it would take many brave hunters with bows and arrows to kill a bear, while any hunter could kill a skunk solo. Thus, even though they had the same scarcity, a bear hide would be more valuable because the human labor required was greater.   Many economics classes simply say value depends on supply and demand. However, if something is in low supply and high demand, it is BECAUSE it takes so much human effort to procure. If it did not take large amounts of human labor, everyone would sell said item and the value would drop.   What is your take on this? do you have a better explanation for value? I apply what you term 'money' to the word 'commodity'. And I agree with littleadv, you are just selling us your perspective on (such things as) precious metals.  What I want you to think about is these truths: When used as currency gold just has two values: utility value and currency value. I hold it is better to separate the two.  There is not enough gold in the earth to represent the value in aggregate economies of the world. Trying to go back to the gold standard would only induce an unimaginable hyperinflation in gold.  Recent years shows that gold does not retain value. See the linked chart. But how valuable is it in the Star Trek world? How much gold is available and how much do they need?Are there alternatives? Will they ever find another element that replaces it? These all affect the actual value...  Nothing has value without demand, so how can anything be intrinsically valuable? Gold is classified as a collectible so the gain rates are as follows: So you'd report a gain of $100 or $1,000 , depending on which coin you sold. "(Value of shares+Dividends received)/(Initial investment) would be the typical formula though this is more of a percentage where 1 would indicate that you broke even, assuming no inflation to be factored. No, you don't have to estimate the share price based on revenues as I would question how well did anyone estimate what kind of revenues Facebook, Apple, or Google have had and will have. To estimate the value of shares, I'd likely consider what does my investment strategy use as metrics: Is it discounted cash flow, is it based on earnings, is it something else? There are many ways to determine what a stock ""should be worth"" that depending on what you want to believe there are more than a few ways one could go." "Gold has very useful physical properties for some engineering applications.  Even tiny amounts of gold can substantially improve products, so it can be worthwhile to pay high prices per ounce for gold.  For example: Gold can be ""beaten"" or electroplated to produce very thin shiny coatings.  Entire roofs (of famous buildings) have been covered with ""gold leaf"", at a cost that was small compared to the supporting structure. A very thin layer of electroplated gold provides better protection against corrosion than a much thicker layer of electroplated nickel.  Even if gold costs thousands of times more per ounce than nickel, it is cheaper to use gold as an anti-corrosion layer than nickel (for use in military-grade naval electronics). A thin layer of electroplated gold greatly increases the electrical current-carrying capacity of a thin copper wire." The calculators on this site should help: http://www.measuringworth.com/  They allow you to choose a currency (only about half a dozen are available), enter an amount and the years to compare, and then provides feedback in a table. Obviously you will need to be careful which calculator you choose. If they don't cover the currencies you are dealing with, see this site: http://projects.exeter.ac.uk/RDavies/arian/current/howmuch.html They provide numerous links that, while they don't provide sleek calculators per se, they do offer guidance on how to handle conversions  yourself. Regarding comparing the cost to something like gold, to try and help younger readers, I think it's a good idea but gold is not the ideal choice for comparison. I'd recommend something more tangible like household goods - what a Playstation would have cost in 1930s money etc. In short: the value of gold is esoteric even for most adults - concrete examples would be better. "Gold had value because it could be stamped with a value.  The value is the number on the coin.   Gold really doesn't have intrinsic value and it's value during a actual famines is very very low.  For more info, see a very interesting digression in ""Wealth of Nations.""" Gold isn't constant in value. If you look at the high price of $800 in January of 1980 and the low of $291 in 2001, you lost a lot of purchasing power, especially since money in 2001 was worth less than in 1980. People claim gold is a stable store of value but it isn't. "It's very hard to measure the worth of an abstract concept like money, particularly over long periods of time. In the modern era we have things like the Consumer Price Index (CPI) in the United States, where the Bureau of Labor Statistics literally sends ""shoppers"" out to find prices of things and surveys people to find out what they buy. This results in a variety of ""indexes"" which variously get reported by media outlets as ""inflation"" (or ""deflation"" if the change in value goes the other way). There are also other measurements available like the MIT Billion Prices Project which attempt to make their own reading of the ""worth"" of currencies. Those kinds of things are about the only ways to measure a currency's change in ""value to itself"" because a currency is basically only worth what one can buy with it. While it isn't ""all the world's currencies combined"", there is a concept of the International Monetary Fund's ""Special Drawing Rights (SDR)"", which is a basket of five currencies used by world central banks to help ""back"" each other's currencies, and is (very) occasionally used as a unit of currency for international contracts. One might be able to compare the price of one currency to that of the SDR, or even to any other weighted average of world currencies that one wanted, but I don't think it's done nearly as often as comparing currencies to the basket of goods one can buy to find ""inflation"". Even though one might think what would be important to measure would be overall Money Supply Inflation, much more often people care more about measuring Price Inflation. (Occasionally people worry about Wage Inflation, but generally that's considered a result of high Price Inflation.) In order to try to keep this on topic as a ""personal finance"" thing rather than an ""economics"" thing, I guess the question is: Why do you want to know? If you have some assets in a particular currency, you probably care most about what you'll be able to buy with them in the future when you want or need to spend them. In that sense, it's inflation that you're likely caring about the most. If you're trying to figure out which currency to keep your assets in, it largely depends on what currency your future expenses are likely to be in, though I can imagine that one might want to move out of a particular currency if there's a lot of political instability that you're expecting to lead to high inflation in a currency for a time." "Are you talking about a country besides the US?  And you're talking about a commercial bank, right?  In the US, banks don't buy gold from consumers.  The last time they sort of did (in the early 1900s), they were trading gold coins for gold certificates, and then they later stopped allowing consumers to trade them back.  This is known by a well-known financial term: ""Gotcha, suckers!"" If someone were naive enough to deposit a $50 Gold American Eagle today in a bank, the depositor will get a credit of $50 on their account, and later some clever person will ask the teller if they have any ""strange money"" lying around, and that lucky person will be able to withdraw a $1,700 coin for $50, if it lasted for even a second in the teller's drawer. But let's say you're going to a place that does indeed still buy gold coins. The discount depends on the type of coin, and the type of damage.  An old (collectible) coin has a part of its value set by the gold value, and part by the collector's premium.  Better specimens command better collector's premiums, so a damaged coin, as long as it isn't a chunk of the coin missing, won't be worth less than the melt value.  (You may not get that much from a dealer, but it should be fairly close.)  If part of the coin is missing, then the person buying it should weigh the coin and adjust the price proportionately.  It's likely, though, that if you have the items in a safe, you may have a puddle or blob of gold, but it should still all be there unless someone takes it.  Gold melts at about 1850 degrees Fahrenheit, but it would take half the surface temperature of the sun for it to boil away.  If it's unidentifiable, it may need to be assayed again." "Why does the value of gold go up when gold itself doesn't produce anything? Why do people invest in gold? Your perception, that the value of gold goes up in the long run, is based on the price of gold measured in your favorite paper currency, for example the US Dollar. An increasing price of gold means that in the visible gold market, market participants are willing to exchange more paper currency units for the same amount of gold. There are many possible reasons for this: While HFT became extremely important for the short term price movements, I will continue with long term effects, excluding HFT. So when - as a simple thought experiment - the amount of available paper currency units (US $ or whatever) doubles, and the amount of goods and services in an economy stay the same, you can expect that the price of everything in this economy will double, including gold. You might perceive that the value of gold doubled. It did not. It stayed the same. The number of printed dollars doubled. The value of gold is still the same, its price doubled. Does the amount of paper currency units grow over time? Yes: https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/BASE/ In this answer my term ""paper currency units"" includes dollars that exist only as digits in bank accounts and ""printing currency"" includes creating those digits in bank accounts out of thin air. So the first answer: gold holds its value while the value of paper currency units shrinks over time. So gold enables you to pass wealth to the next generation (while hiding it from your government). That gold does not produce anything is not entirely true. For those of us mortals who have only a few ounces, it is true. But those who have tons can lease it out and earn interest.  (in practice it is leased out multiple times, so multiple that gain. You might call this fraud, and rightfully so. But we are talking about tons of gold. Nobody who controls tons of physical gold goes to jail yet).  Let's talk about Fear. You see, the perceived value of gold increases as more paper currency is printed.  And markets price in expected future developments. So the value of gold rises, if a sufficient number of wealthy people fear the the government(s) will print too much paper currency.  Second Answer: So the price of gold not only reflects the amount of paper currency, it is also a measurement of distrust in government(s). Now you might say something is wrong with my argument. The chart mentioned above shows that we have now (mid 2015) 5 times as much printed currency units than we had 2008.  So the price of gold should be 5 times as high as 2008, assuming the amount of distrust in governments stayed the same. There must be more effects (or I might be completely wrong. You decide). But here is one more effect: As the price of gold is a measurement of distrust in governments (and especially the US government since the US Dollar is perceived as the reserve currency), the US government and associated organizations are extremely interested in low gold prices to prove trust. So people familiar with the topic believe that the price of gold (and silver) is massively manipulated to the downside using high frequency trading and shorts in the futures markets by US government and wall street banks to disprove distrust. And wall street banks gain huge amounts of paper currency units by manipulating the price, mostly to the downside. Others say that countries like china and russia are also interested in low gold prices because they want to buy as much physical gold as possible. Knowing of the value that is not reflected by the price at the moment. Is there one more source of distrust in governments? Yes. Since 1971, all paper currencies are debt.  They receive their value by the trust that those with debt are willing and able to pay back their debt. If this trust is lost, the downward manipulation (if you think that such a thing exists) of the gold and silver prices in the futures markets might fail some day. If this is the case (some say when this is the case). you might see movements in gold and silver prices that bring them back to equilibrium with the amount of printed paper currencies. In times of the roman empire you got a good toga and a pair of handmade shoes for an ounce of gold. In our days, you get a nice suite and a good pair of shoes for an ounce of gold. In the mean time, the value of each paper currency in the history of each country went to zero and the US $ lost 98% of its initial value. As long as there is not enough distrust, more paper currency is made in equity markets and bond markets on average. (Be aware that you earn that currency only after you were able to sell at this price, not while you hold it) Gerd" "Nobody can give you a definitive answer.  To those who suggest it's expensive at these prices, [I'd point to this chart](http://treo.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a6002285970c014e8c39f2c3970d-850wi) showing the price of gold versus the global money supply over the past decade or so.  It's not conclusive, but it's evidence that gold tracks the money supply relatively well.  There might be a bit of risk premium baked in that it would shed in a stable economy, but that premium is unknowable.  It's also (imo) probably worth the protection it provides.  In an inflationary scenario (Euro devaluation) gold will hold its buying power very well.  It also fares well in a deflationary environment, just not quite as well as holding physical currency.  Note that in such an environment, bank defaults are a big danger: that 50k might only be safe under your mattress (rather than in a fractionally reserved bank account).  If you're buying gold, certificates aren't exactly a bad option, although there still exists the counterparty risk of the agent storing your gold, as well as political risk of the nation where it's being held.  Buying physical bullion ameliorates these risks, but then you face the problem of protecting it.  Safe deposit boxes, a home safe, or burying it in your backyard are all possible options.  The merits of each, I'll leave as an exerice to the reader.  Foreign currency might be a little bit better than the Euro, but as we've seen in the past year or so, the Swiss Franc has been devalued to match the Euro in the proverbial ""race to the bottom"".  It's probably not much better than another fiat currency.  I don't know anything about Norway.  Edit: Depending on your time horizon, my personal opinion would be to put no less than 5-10% of your savings in a hard store of value (e.g. gold, silver, platinum).  Depending on your risk appetite, you could probably stand to put a lot more into it, especially given the Eurozone turmoil.  Of course, as with anything else, your mileage may vary, past performance does not guarantee future results, this is not investment advice, seek professional medical help if you experience an erection lasting longer than four hours." You should invest a trivial (<500$USD) amount of money in a stock portfolio. If you aren't able to make more on the market than the interest rates of your loans, you are losing money. This question has discussed this topic as well.