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Gold is shiny, alluring, and mostly pointless — it’s also crushed the stock market as an investment

Gold is hitting new highs as traders seek safe haven assets.

6/16/25 8:12AM

Anyone who has followed the market for any length of time will be unsurprised that gold — that shiny, malleable metal that humans have been obsessed with for millennia — has risen over the last week. When markets get skittish, investors seek out safe havens, and the escalating violence in Israel and Iran has been no exception, with the price of an ounce of gold coming close to its all-time high of $3,500 on Friday, up 3% in the last week and 8% over the last month.

But if gold offers some downside protection against war, economic risks, or even just more mundane threats like inflation, it stands to reason that over a longer time frame, it will have lost ground to the innovation machine that is the American stock market.

The paradox of gold, then, is that it has also crushed the US stock market over the last 25 years — a period of remarkable innovation and growth — rising more than 1,000% since 2000.

The S&P 500 Index has risen only 312% over the same time frame. Even adding dividends into the calculation doesn’t help stocks catch up, with the S&P 500’s total return coming in at only ~550% over the last 25 years.

This comparison is helped by the fact that the early 2000s happened to be a horrible period for stocks. But even more recently, gold has shone: it beat stocks last year, and is beating them again this year.

So, why is gold doing so well? It’s not soaring demand for shiny gold jewelry.

The fact that real interest rates have been low for much of that period explains a lot — you’re not “missing out” on holding a lump of gold if the alternative, like parking your cash in Treasurys or a bank account, isn’t very attractive. Most importantly, though, gold seems to have strengthened its identity as a safe store of value thanks in no small part to the crises of the age: the market turmoil of the dot-com crash, the global financial crisis of 2008, the pandemic and ensuing inflation — and, perhaps most critically, Russia’s war against Ukraine and subsequent sanctions, which caused some unease about holding US dollar assets in reserve compared to the shiny metal.

What doesn’t kill you makes gold stronger, I guess.

Matt Phillips1h

‘Golden age of profit margins’ seen in 2026

Wall Street tends to be a pretty optimistic place. But on one measure, market watchers are the most optimistic on record.

FactSet data shows the consensus estimate for S&P 500 net profit margins in calendar year 2026 calls for the gauge to climb to 13.9% in 2026.

But if borne out by events next year “it will mark the highest (annual) net profit margin reported by the index since FactSet began tracking this metric in 2008,” wrote John Butters, senior earnings analyst at the financial data company.

A recent story from Barron’s also commented on the expectations for especially fat profit margins embedded into forecasts for next year.

“We are in the golden age of margins,” RBC’s Capital Markets’ head of US equity strategy, Lori Calvasina, told the magazine.

That’s good news for investors looking forward to next year. But the follow up question, of course, is where the growth in profitability is expected to come from. The answer, as you might have guessed, is tech. Though the precise mechanisms by which those profits land in the coffers of the giant tech firms remains something of a mystery. Barron’s doesn’t get into the details, saying “call it benefits from AI, pricing power, or whatever.”

That doesn’t exactly sound like money in the bank. But even die-hard haters of AI have to acknowledge that betting against the ability of giant tech companies to generate massive profit growth has been a bad trade for the last couple decades.

The Stock Market Needs to Focus on Lucky 13

A recent story from Barron’s also commented on the expectations for especially fat profit margins embedded into forecasts for next year.

“We are in the golden age of margins,” RBC’s Capital Markets’ head of US equity strategy, Lori Calvasina, told the magazine.

Luke Kawa2h

Opendoor rises after CEO Kaz Nejatian touts an explosion in its home-buying footprint

Opendoor Technologies gained in early trading after CEO Kaz Nejatian touted an explosion in the company’s home-buying footprint.

In a message on X, the former Shopify COO posted two maps: one of which depicts a fairly limited area in which the online real estate company would buy or sell homes, and the second of which suggests that has now expanded to include the entire lower 48:

Big launch week at @Opendoor.

ZIP codes where @Opendoor buys homes. pic.twitter.com/UplMd4sXJE
— Kaz Nejatian (@CanadaKaz) December 22, 2025

In a follow-up tweet, Nejatian attributed the gains to AI, writing, “First pic took 10 *years* of work without AI. Second pic took 10 *weeks* of work with AI.”

On his first earnings call as CEO, Nejatian said the company had adopted a “default to AI approach.”

One of his first pledges was to launch Opendoor everywhere in the lower 48.

Max Knoblauch2h

Hertz surges on bullish options activity

As millions begrudgingly make their way to the rental car counter amid the winter holidays, investors are pouring into calls and sending Hertz stock soaring.

As of 10:51 a.m. eastern, Hertz had seen 17,861 calls traded. That’s already significantly ahead of the 20-day average volume of 12,956. Hertz shares are up more than 12%.

If Hertz’s price action holds, the move will mark its ninth-best trading day of 2025.

Luke Kawa2h

POET Technologies jumps on elevated call activity

Optical communications company POET Technologies is up double digits in early trading on Monday as this potential supporting player in the AI boom gets a bid from the options market.

Just an hour after the opening bell sounded, call volumes are already running well above their five-session average for a full day.

The stock became a retail favorite in early Q4 right before many speculative trades began to retreat, with record call volumes of nearly 600,000 on October 7. The last big bump in options activity came on December 3, the session after Marvell’s acquisition of Celestial AI, a customer of POET, offered some validation for its technology as a data center solution.

Max Knoblauch3h

Nintendo dips after GameStop says the “Mario Kart World” bundle will stop being produced

Nintendo’s popular bundle that packaged the Switch 2 with “Mario Kart World” is seemingly going out of production, per a post on X from GameStop.

Shares of the console maker fell more than 3% after markets opened on Monday, implying some worry from investors that consumers may not be so willing to pay the game’s elevated $80 price tag (it’s valued at $50 in the bundle). About 9.6 million copies of the game have sold since the Switch 2 released in June, a figure that includes the bundled version.

The Switch 2 itself is still looking solid, sales-wise. It was pacing 68% ahead of the original Switch in October, though November saw a sharp market-wide spending drop-off on consoles according to data from Circana. Sony’s PS5 outsold the Switch 2 in both units and dollars last month.