– This is the script of CNBC's news report for China's CCTV on May 3, Tuesday.
Welcome to CNBC Business Daily, I'm Qian Chen.
Gold rose to a fresh 15-month peak above $1,300 an ounce on Monday in holiday-thinned trade as an early retreat in the dollar drove prices higher, though it later eased as the U.S. currency pared losses.
Many Asian markets and London were closed for national holidays, dampening momentum in the precious metal, which posted its biggest weekly rally since early February last week, up more than 5 percent.
That was chiefly driven by weakness in the dollar, which had its worst week since 2008 versus the yen after the Bank of Japan unexpectedly opted against further monetary easing.
Gold is enjoying an incredible year, surging 22 percent as the S&P 500 is barely positive. What's rare is for the yellow metal to outperform the market so dramatically in a year when stocks are up.
Some experts believe gold prices are to go higher.
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[JIM (t) RICKARDS, The James Rickards Project Director, Strategic Intelligence Editor] "065235 it's going to go alot higher, the reason is people say gold is up but the way I think about it is gold is really constant, what's really happening is the dollar is going down. In other words, the dollar price of gold is going up but that just means a weaker dollar and if you want to understand where the price of gold is going, you have to ask yourself where is the dollar going 065251"
In fact, going back to 1980, there has been only year in which gold has outperformed the S&P by 20 percent or more while the latter was positive on the year: 2007.
Both gold and the fear-measuring CBOE Volatility Index surged in the second half of that year, even as stocks maintained their footing. The crash, of course, came in 2008.
Of course, the performance of the equity market cannot be predicted based on a single data point (or an infinite number of them, most likely). And there is still a lot of year left in 2016. Still, the potential propensity for gold to sniff out bad news earlier has some investors feeling less sure about holding stocks.
"Fear about a lot of really negative news flow is probably driving people into gold, even though it's not driving people out of the equity market for now," said Manhattan Venture Partners' chief economist Max Wolff.
"We believe that speculative financial investors have been driving the gold price up significantly of late," Commerzbank said in a note. "The same also applies to silver, platinum and palladium."
CNBC's Qian Chen, reporting from Singapore.
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