ETF Comparison: S&P 500 Performance Relative to Gold

Michael Panzner did an article today about whether the S&P's gains mean anything in real dollar value, and I decided to take a quick stab at a way of visualizing this. Therefore, I've charted here the relative performance of the streetTracks gold ETF and the S&P tracker (GLD and SPY).

This is the cumulative sum of the daily difference in log-return over the past 100 days, and as you can see, despite the S&P's impressive summer, it has still lost value relative to gold. As an example, yesterday's post-FOMC S&P gain led to a log-return of 0.029. After adjusting for gold as numeraire, the return is nearly halved to 0.0188.

click to enlarge