Gold Bugs Do the Griddy as Grandpa’s Coins Dunk 135% on Tech Bros’ Sad 40% AI Bags

Wow. I didn’t know that. I just… you’re telling me now for the first time.

File this under sh*t nobody saw coming in 2025: gold stocks are out here absolutely cooking AI chips like they’re on a late-night Waffle House griddle. And if you thought Thanksgiving dinner was already going to be a bloodbath, just wait until Grandpa fires up a Marlboro, leans back in the recliner, and gives you a three-hour TED Talk on why you were an idiot for buying Nvidia and AMD instead of the miners he’s been hoarding since Reagan rocked shoulder pads.

And (painful as it is to admit) Grandpa was right. This time. Put down the GPUs and AI Kool-Aid… miners are the ones bench-pressing 135% gains in 2025 while tech bros are stuck spotting. Not only did the MSCI gold index beat semiconductors’ 40% rally, it dragged them out back by the shirt, Soprano-style, and buried the body. Best outperformance in history. Period.

(Source: Bloomberg)

Gold itself has been on a heater too, exploding more than 45% and touching all-time highs like it’s 1979 all over again (minus the shag carpeting and Carter-era gas lines that had everyone fist-fighting at the pump). The drivers are obvious: central banks are stacking reserves again (China leading the charge), ETFs have been vacuuming up billions from FOMO investors, and Powell’s rate cuts burned the appeal of cash and Treasuries, making non-yielding rocks look like the new hot asset class.

Even the whole “let’s ditch the dollar” movement has given gold a new halo. Meanwhile, miners like Newmont and Agnico Eagle have doubled, Zijin Mining has smoked Alibaba with a 130% pop, and Fresnillo has almost quadrupled, making it the gold standard of the FTSE 100 (pun absolutely intended). 

Compare that to semis, where investors are paying 29 times forward earnings versus a chill 13 times for miners, and the math looks like AI bros are the ones getting robbed blind.

But the most surprising part (at least to me) is that gold and stocks are rallying together. Normally, one’s the safety blanket when the other catches fire. But with the S&P 500 up 13% in 2025 and gold up 84% since the start of 2024, investors are having their cake and eating it too. All while inflation’s stuck at 2.9%, tariffs are still hanging around like a bad fart, and the Fed is back to going BRRR.

Some strategists chalk it up to a “currency debasement” trade… essentially a hedge against the Fed watering down the dollar with rate cuts and debt spending. But others, like Macquarie’s Viktor Shvets, argue gold’s rally has gone beyond inflation math into what he calls an “Insanity Premium.” Translation: investors are scared sh*tless about weaker currencies, and believe society’s one bad headline away from going full full Maze Runner mode.

No matter how you slice it, the math doesn’t lie. Gold just took AI stocks behind the woodshed and handed them an all-timer of a beating. And if this isn’t one of the weirdest circumstances in stock market history, I don’t know what is.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News doesn’t hold positions in companies mentioned in the article.