Gold underperformed U.S. stocks in the 1990s in an era of deregulation, Frank Holmes, chief investment officer and CEO of San Antonio-based U.S. Global Investors Inc., said in an interview. That trend started to reverse in 2002 as government regulation increased, and accelerated with the Dodd-Frank rules instituted after the financial crisis of 2008, Holmes said. Rising demand from emerging economies such as India and China has also contributed to higher prices of the metal, he said.

Fear, Love

"We're on a hyper-speed of regulation, and that's not the best thing for the stock markets," said Holmes, who oversees more than $3 billion in funds including those that invest in gold-mining stocks. "The rise of China and India has set up a different dynamic for gold, so you're seeing the fear trade as well as the love trade."

The SPDR Gold Trust ETF, created by the World Gold Council in November 2004, is the biggest ETF tracking the price of the precious metal. State Street, based in Boston, is the sales and marketing agent for the fund, which is physically backed by gold bars deposited in a London vault. It's one of at least three such U.S.-based ETFs. New York-based BlackRock Inc. (BLK)'s iShares Gold Trust had a market value of almost $10 billion on Aug. 19.

David Fuller's view Vastly more people have both the freedom and the wealth to own gold today, than during the last secular bull market in the 1970s.

It is very likely that those who own some gold today are more numerous than all the people who might have owned some of the yellow metal throughout human history prior to the 21st century.

Looking at these charts of gold (weekly 5-year, weekly 5-year semi-log, 10-year monthly & 10-year semi-log), you can see that gold has now all but equalled its accelerations and therefore overextension of 2006 and 2008. These trend overextensions can persist for weeks (eight and counting, so far) and have all ended with downward dynamics on the weekly charts.

Those signals, including a weekly key reversal in 2008, marked the onset of mean reversion corrections to the 200-day MA. This trend smoothing indicator only turned down for a while as the consequence of the far bigger setback in 2008.

Given the trend acceleration occurring in August 2011, which is now the biggest monthly gain of this secular bull market to date, the next weekly downward dynamic is likely to be important, marking the onset of the biggest correction since 2008. It may occur near the psychological $2000 level as we saw near $1000 in 2008. However, if gold were to surge above $2000 for more than a few days, it could indicate that a considerably more dramatic acceleration was underway. That is possible because this month's surge is occurring before gold has even entered its main period of seasonal strength in Q4 and the following year's Q1.

(See additional comments on gold below, including in Eoin's section.)