Despite a Friday bump in the road, the S&P 500 is still within a stone’s throw of its all-time high and is now trading roughly 40 percent above its pre-Financial Crisis high. Yet despite the stock market being swept up in one of the most impressive bull markets in history since early 2009, it has still underperformed a surprising alternative investment in the past decade.

In the past 10 years, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust SPY 0.38% is up an impressive 66 percent. However, in that same time, the SPDR Gold Trust (ETF) GLD 0.25% is up 109.6 percent.

This outperformance by gold is somewhat surprising considering that gold is often thought of as a flight to safety trade when the stock market is weak. However, while it’s true that gold does tend to perform well during times of stock market uncertainty, a long-term look at the SPY and the GLD highlights another important point about gold: it can still perform well even when the stock market is rising.

Gold prices went…

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