Until 1971, our government used to dictate the price of gold, which was referred to as the gold standard. Gold-backed up the US dollar this way and its price remained the same for decades at a time until modified by the government to reflect the ever-growing printed money supply backed by gold. The chart below shows the price of gold since 1915.
In 1971, President Nixon removed the gold standard, and since then the performance of gold has been nothing but phenomenal, as witnessed in the charts below.
Gold historical price chart showing that Gold went up 36.42 times since the 1970s.
Historical price chart for the Dow Jones – May 1970 until today
DJIA Price chart showing that Dow Jones went up 5.34 times since the 1970s.
The bottom line is that gold did 6.8 times better than the Dow Jones.