Which is another way of saying gold went up a lot last year. It is not a way of saying Gold went up a lot last year. It is saying Gold went up alot last year, the year before, the year before that, and so on back 8 years.
Gold is a dog that occasionally has a pop when the dollar falls or there is a reasonably serious security scare.
In the past 5 years Gold is up 115%. That is more than an occassional pop.
Pick a better index to compare it with (e.g. midcaps) and it hasn't.
If you really want to start comparing indexes take a look at this chart. It is the Gold Miners Index HUI (green line) against indexes for small cap (dark blue line), large cap (light blue line), oil (red line), housing (pink line), banking (purple line), and retail (dark green line) going back to August 2002 when the Philadelphia Housing Sector Index was started. The Gold Miners Index has outperformed these other indexes by 33% to 129% since August 2002.
In the past 2 years (not 5), US midcaps have gone up 100%. So what? A year and a half ago, gold was $400 an ounce. In 1989, gold was $400 an ounce. No yield. The local returns look good in a rear view mirror only because it first crashed to $250 and then popped to $550. If you bought it 10 years ago you've made about 4% per year. If you bought it 15 years ago at $350, a decent price for the past series, you've made about 3% per year. Both measured to the present peak - anyone who sold a year ago got virtually nothing. Worse than bonds, over a pretty poor time for them.
In the long run gold tracks inflation, nothing more. It just tends to pile that all into short bursts followed by long dead stretches. That makes it a decent occasional inflation or currency-depreciation speculation, for those willing to try to time it and bet on its turns. But it is not an investment, never has been, never will be. And the average person playing in the gold market is going to get a real after tax return of zero if he is lucky, in the long run.