What killed off the gold rush?

This week saw an epic plunge in the gold price. What does it portend, and should you still be buying gold? John Stepek reports, and tips one fund for brave investors.

We learned a new word this week: goldenfreude'. It's a word coined by Joe Weisenthal of the Business Insider website to describe the sense of sheer glee felt by many financial pundits at this week's plunge in the gold price.

On Friday, the gold price started the day at around $1,560 per ounce. By the end of the day on Monday, the price had fallen well below $1,400, dropping as far as $1,322 at one point. Resounding cries of "gold is dead" and "Bernanke has won" spread across Twitter and the blogosphere.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.