Gold price over 10 years – chart and return

When looking at historical gold prices, it is essential to distinguish between a "rolling" period and a "calendar year". A rolling ten-year period means measuring the return from an arbitrary start date and ten years forward, regardless of when in the year the start date falls – for example from 14 March 2014 to 14 March 2024. A calendar year, by contrast, always measures from 1 January to 31 December of a given year. The difference sounds technical, but it matters greatly in practice: the return for "the last ten years" as seen from today will typically differ from the return in a summary that only looks at whole calendar years, because the start and end points fall at different moments within the price's fluctuations. When our site displays yearly summaries, this is normally based on the calendar year's opening and closing price, whereas a rolling period is based on the exact date you choose.

This distinction is particularly important when assessing whether gold has "historically delivered a good return". If, for example, you start the measurement right after a sharp price rise and end right before a decline, the rolling return will look worse than a return measured from trough to peak. You should therefore always be critical of single return figures and instead look at several different start and end points to get a more nuanced picture.

There are several ways to calculate a return over a period, and they often produce different figures. The simple, total return is calculated as (end price minus start price) divided by start price, multiplied by 100 to get a percentage. This figure tells you how much your investment has grown or declined in value over the entire period, but it says nothing about how the return was distributed year by year.

To find the average annual return over a multi-year period, the so-called CAGR formula (Compound Annual Growth Rate) is used instead, expressed as follows: CAGR = (end price divided by start price) raised to the power of 1 divided by the number of years, minus 1. This calculation accounts for the compounding effect and gives a more accurate picture of the average annual growth rate than simply dividing the total return by the number of years. The two methods can produce markedly different results, especially over periods with large swings, so it is important to be aware of which method underlies a given return figure when comparing sources or periods.

Historical gold price data is typically collected in euro or US dollars, as these are the currencies in which the international gold market is primarily traded. To show a Danish user prices in Danish kroner, the historical price series must be converted into DKK. It is important to note that this site's historical series are converted using the current exchange rate between euro and Danish kroner, not the historical exchange rate that actually applied at the relevant historical point in time. In practice, this means that a price swing you see far back in time in krone terms purely reflects the swing in the gold price itself measured in euro – not a combination of gold price swings and the exchange rate swings of that time.

Since the Danish krone has for many years been pegged closely to the euro through the ERM II arrangement, the difference between using the historical and the current EUR/DKK rate is influenced by the exchange-rate peg; the actual difference still depends on the date chosen. If one instead wanted to see historical prices converted from US dollars, the difference between the historical and current rate could be considerably larger, since the dollar exchange rate against both the euro and the krone has fluctuated more over the decades. You should therefore treat long-term historical DKK price series on this site as an approximation well suited to showing the overall development in the gold price, but not as a precise historical accounting reconstruction of what a Danish investor would actually have paid or received in kroner at that particular historical point in time.

The history of the gold price is far from a straight line upward. There have been several marked downturns (so-called drawdowns), where the price has fallen significantly from a previous peak before rising again. A drawdown is typically measured as the percentage difference between a peak price and the subsequent lowest price, before the price again exceeds the previous peak. Looking at historical drawdowns gives a picture of how large a decline in value an investor could, at worst, have experienced along the way, even though the overall long-term return has been positive. This is a useful complement to looking at average annual returns, because a nice average can conceal some very uncomfortable periods along the way.

When assessing a historical return in practice, you should also bear in mind two additional factors that are rarely included in the raw figures. First, dealer spread: if you both bought and sold physical gold through a dealer, you must subtract the dealer's buying and selling spread at both points in time, which reduces your actual realised return compared with the theoretical spot price development. Second, inflation: a nominal return in kroner does not tell you how much purchasing power you have actually gained or lost. To find the real (inflation-adjusted) return, you must compare the gold price's development with the development of the consumer price index over the same period. Both factors can make a difference of several percentage points per year and should always be considered when assessing whether gold has historically been a good investment for your particular situation.