Gold Investment Return Calculator

Precious Metals vs Stocks: Investment Return Estimator

Simply select a start year within the past 25 years and a lump-sum investment amount.

The calculator will estimate the current⁺ value of your chosen lump sum investment, across a variety of common precious metal mixes and contrast their values with popular blue-chip⁺⁺ stocks.

Gold and Silver’s Best Use is for Diversification

Despite the Bullion.Directory team being 100% gold obsessed, we built this calculator to highlight gold’s main use as a diversifier. While the 25 year average annual return for gold and silver at 8.65% and 8.52% beats 7.67% for the S&P 500 and 6.93% for the Dow, we would never suggest going all-in on metals.

By playing with the above calculator, you will rapidly see your hypothetical investment value will vary considerably depending on when you entered the market.

Some years will see a 100%-focused gold investment beat stocks into the ground. Others will see metals and stocks seeing similar overall gains, whilst a few will have stocks take gold behind the proverbial woodshed.

Yet by owning a basket covering both metals AND stocks or similar investment vehicles, your overall portfolio will typically get the best of both worlds – and use gold’s proven hedging ability to save your skin (or indeed retirement account) if and when the stock market has it’s next inevitable correction.

And Enron? We added Enron into the calculator as a jokey yet serious note that even the best and most trustworthy stocks, in the best and most beloved ‘too-big-to-fail’ companies, can and regularly do go to zero.

Which again helps illustrate gold’s use as a form of insurance. Gold’s intrinsic value and global desirability mean it will never ‘do’ an Enron.