Gold Priced in GBP – February 2010 Update

I am currently forced to buy gold priced in GBP for my retirement investing strategy as this is where my earnings from employment occurs. I t therefore makes sense to look at how gold has performed over the years priced in local currency.

At the time of writing this post the announcement has just been made that the government’s net borrowings for January are dire at £4.34 billion compared with last year’s surplus of £5.3 billion. This looks to have caused the GBP to weaken to 1.557 to the USD and even with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) declaring that they intend to sell 191.3 tons making gold priced in GBP to be currently £715.57.

In absolute terms gold has never been this expensive when looking back over historic average monthly data since 1979. However there has been a lot of inflation over this period and so as always I will look at the real (inflation) adjusted price of gold over this period which is my chart today. The inflation dataset that I will use is the UK retail prices index (RPI).

This chart shows a very different story. Since 1979 we have seen two higher real peaks. The first was £840.89 in 1983 and the second was £1043.39 back in 1980. These peaks are 18% and 46% higher respectively than today’s price suggesting that there is still plenty of potential upside.

The trend line of the chart suggest gold today at only £248.20 and the historical average real gold price from 1979 is £429.50. So by both these measures gold looks over priced in GBP terms.

History suggests that gold has significant potential upside from its price today and given that I am underweight gold against my desired low charge portfolio I think I am going to buy some more. I will of course update the blog when this occurs.

As always DYOR.

Assumptions include:
- Last Gold price actual taken on the 18 February 2010
- All other prices are month averages.
- February ‘10 inflation is extrapolated.