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Comment by Willish42 | Hacker News Reader

The fact that "worth their weight in cold" typically means in the single-digit millions is fascinating to me (though I doubt I'll be able to get there myself, maybe someday). I looked it up though and I think this is undercounting the current value of gold per ounce/lb/etc.

5320814 / 180 / 16 = ~1847.5

Per https://www.apmex.com/gold-price and https://goldprice.org/, current value is north of $2400 / oz. It was around $1800 in 2020. That growth for _gold_ of all things (up 71% in the last 5 years) is crazy to me.

It's worth noting that anyone with a ski house that expensive probably has a net worth well over twice the price of that ski house. I guess it's time to start learning CUDA!

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> That growth for _gold_ of all things (up 71% in the last 5 years) is crazy to me.

For comparison: S&P500 grew about the same during that period (more than 100% from Jan 2019, about 70 from Dec 2019), so the higher price of gold did not outperform the growth of the general (financial) economy.

But that's still surprising performance, because the S&P generates income and pays dividends. Its increase reflects (at least, is supposed to!) expectations of future higher income. Gold doesn't even bear interest....

The S&P doesn't really pay much in the way of dividends does it? Last time I checked it was order-of-magnitude 1% which is a bit of a joke figure.

Anyway, there isn't a lot of evidence that the value of gold is going up. It seems to just be keeping pace with the M2. Both doubled-and-a-bit since 2010 (working in USD).

Gold is commonly seen as a hedge against inflation and a decently stable non-currency store of value. With many countries having/being perceived to have high inflation during this time, the price of gold is bound to rise as well. Pretty much any economic or sociopolitical tremor will bounce up the price of the gold at least temporarily.

Note: gold uses troy ounces, so adjust by ~10%. It's easier to just use grams or kilograms :).

Thanks, I'm a bit new to this entire concept. Do troy lbs also exist, or is that just a term when measuring ounces?

yes, there are troy pounds, they are 12 troy ounces (not 16 ounces, like normal (avoirdupois) pounds)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_weight

180 avoirdupois pounds is 2,625 ounces troy. The gold price is around $2470/ounce troy today, so $2470*2625 ~= $6.483 million

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