Gold has regained some of its shine.
The price of the precious metal climbed Thursday as it paced for its best month in four years. Global central bank stimulus and investors' search for market safe havens pushed gold prices to their highest levels since 2013 earlier this week.
Another record was hit earlier this week by the SPDR Gold Shares (GLD), the largest exchange-traded fund in the market backed by physical gold. Investors piled into the popular fund with a remarkable appetite, creating the highest number of shares outstanding in GLD since 2013 as of Monday.
The surge in demand for gold comes at an interesting time for the underlying precious metals market, analysts said.
"You've actually got a decrease in the supply of gold while the demand is going up, and it's pretty unusual to see the actual production of gold be influenced while prices are rising, so, you've got a double whammy there," Jason Bloom, director of global macro ETF strategy at Invesco, told CNBC's "ETF Edge" on Monday.
That lid on supply has driven Wall Street price targets for gold into the $2,000-$3,000 range, Bloom said.
"I haven't seen that before. It does remind me a little bit of the spike in gold we saw following the '08-'09 financial crisis and the stimulus that was enacted then," he said. "I guess this time it will be interesting to see: are people buying gold because of inflation fears? Obviously, the inflation didn't pan out and we saw a huge retracement."
As supply comes back online, demand will remain key to gold's trajectory, as will low interest rates around the world, Bloom said.
But that's hardly the metal's only catalyst, Tom Lydon, CEO of ETF Trends and ETF Database, told "ETF Edge" in the same interview.
"As many of these emerging market countries have enjoyed the growth of global economies, you've got the middle class that's buying gold. That's where most of the demand is coming from for sure," he said. "But on top of that, supply has been really tough because it's not that inexpensive to get an ounce of gold out of the ground the way it used to be."
Gold prices climbed early Thursday to around $1,718 on expectations for further monetary easing from global central banks. The GLD ETF fell slightly in early trading to just above $160.50 a share.
Disclosure: Invesco is the sponsor of CNBC's "ETF Edge."
