Gold Surrenders Streak as Investors Embrace Stocks With 20% Gain

Investors’ 12-year love affair with gold ended in 2013 as they abandoned the precious metal for stock markets in the world’s developed economies, lifting global share prices by the most in four years.

While the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index surged to a record in the broadest-ever advance and bonds worldwide lost money for the first time since 1999, it was the 28 percent plunge in gold, the worst in more than three decades, that stunned investors the most, according to Quincy Krosby, a market strategist at Prudential Financial Inc.