Dow Jones Gold Ratio: Making Money from this All-Important Indicator

If you are a stock market investor or a gold investor, or both, today’s PROFIT CONFIDENTIAL is a must-read. Why? Because, by the time you are finished reading this issue, you could very well be convinced long-term that the stock market is going down and gold is going up. And you can make a lot of money from these moves.

Let’s start with the important numbers all investors should be aware of:

Stock history first: The Dow Jones Industrial Average opened the year 2000 at 10,786. The same index ended 2010 at 11,577.50. In a nutshell, if you were an investor in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, your capital gain appreciation over the past 11 years would have been a paltry 7.3%. (No wonder we have always preferred micro-cap stocks, penny stocks and small-cap stocks!)

Gold history now: At the beginning of the year 2000, gold bullion was trading at $280.00 per ounce. Gold bullion closed out 2010 at $1,422 per ounce—a gain of 407% in 11 years.

Now, let’s pretend you can’t buy the stocks that comprise the Dow Jones Industrial Average in U.S. dollars, but you can only buy them with gold bullion. Taking the numbers above, in 2000, it would have taken 38.5 ounces of gold to buy the Dow Jones Industrial Average. At the end of 2010, it would have taken only 8.2 ounces of gold to buy the Dow Jones Industrial Average. In other words, when measured in gold and not dollars, the value of the 30 big stocks that make up the Dow Jones Industrials has plummeted over the past decade.

Now, when we look back at almost a century of data in respect to the relationship between gold bullion and the Dow Jones Industrials (often referred to as the Dow Jones Gold Ratio), it gets really interesting.

In the period from 1930 to 1949, a 19-year span, the price of the Dow Jones Industrial Average measured in gold bullion was under 5.0 (during that 19-year period it would have taken less than five ounces of gold to figuratively buy the Dow Jones Industrial Averages’ index).

In the period from 1974 to 1989, a 15-year span, the price of the Dow Jones Industrial Average measured in gold bullion was under 5.0 again.

As I started writing years ago, with the sharp rise in the price of gold since the year 2000, I believe we are entering another multi-year period where it will cost less than five ounces of gold to buy the Dow Jones Industrial Average. To see that happen, the price of gold needs to rise sharply, or the stock market has to come down, or both events need to occur.

Now the scary part: over the last century there have been three times when only one ounce of gold could buy the Dow Jones Industrial Average. If we are headed close to that level again (which I believe we are), fortunes will be made over the next few years on the long side of gold and short side of stocks.

Michael’s Personal Notes:

Words of wisdom from our esteemed technical analyst, Anthony Jasansky, P. Eng., on President Obama inadvertently putting the brakes on the stock market rally:

“Money talks and it has been talking very loud after Uncle Ben started the money printing presses at the old Fed in late 2008. He was so impressed by the results of the magical out-of-thin air creation of $1.75 trillion—dubbed ingeniously as ‘quantitative easing (QE)’—that, in the fall of 2010, he cranked up the printing presses again, launching the $600-billion QE2.

“Though these two huge money injections have been credited with reversing financial and economic calamity, they still fell short on some important fronts. Among the notable failings of QE are the anemic recovery in GDP, lack of growth in employment, continued weakness in residential and commercial real estate, the battered U.S. dollar, and unexpectedly higher yields of long-term treasuries and bonds.

“When recently questioned on the effectiveness of QE, the Fed’s chairman has pointed to the strong stock market as one important benefit. Without missing a beat, the U.S. President in his January 25 State of the Union speech mentioned the recovery in the stock market as being the result of government actions to prevent a depression. Knowing how perverse the market can be, Obama’s bullish assertion may turn out be a timely signal for the stocks to take a deep breather.”

Where the Market Stands; Where it’s Headed:

Could the bear market rally in stocks be over? After all, the Dow Jones Industrials suddenly fell 166 points on Friday. Last Friday was a wake-up call for investors and traders getting too cocky with this market. Stocks do not go up in a straight line week after week (as has been the case for most of December 2010 and this January).

While I need to see more action from the stock market before I throw in the towel on the bear market rally that started in March of 2009, I doubt the rally is over. This week opens with the Dow Jones Industrial Average up 2.1% for 2011.

What He Said:

“‘Home sales down 8.4%, could be the bottom,’ read the headline in last Friday’s USA Today. What do they know that I don’t? They know what realtors and their associations tell them and that’s about it. Unfortunately, the real estate news is predominately written by reporters—not real estate investors with years of experience to share. The hard facts about the real estate market in the U.S. are truly scary. How can the U.S. economy escape the hard landing in U.S. home prices? As we’ll soon find out, it simply can’t!” Michael Lombardi in PROFIT CONFIDENTIAL, January 31, 2007. While the popular media was predicting a bottoming of the real estate market in 2007, Michael was preparing his readers for the worst of times ahead.