Gold's Stairway to Heaven

Gold's recent uptrend has investors wondering just how high it'll climb before it's time to sell.

Convincing yourself to hold out for the long bull run isn't easy, but it is usually wiser than giving in too early.

It'll be difficult to know for sure when it is time to sell, but a little history lesson may help guide investors in the right direction...

Looking at gold's historic record with charts helps deepen our understanding of gold's price trends.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, gold soared from $35 an ounce to a remarkable $850 in less than a decade's time.

Here's what “Gold's Stairway to Heaven” looked like then:

Flash forward a couple more decades, and gold began another epic climb.

Here's what it looks like now:

Gold spiked to an all-time high back on September 5, 2011.

As we're now resting smack in the middle of the Ides of March, that means gold's all-time peak was reached six months ago.

Patient gold owners are waiting for the next peak...

Throughout the 21st century, these six-month breathers are hardly uncommon. Some gold-corrections last even longer.

The BullionVault examines gold's “peak” trends from the year 2000 to the year 2011. Take a look:

This chart adequately proves that higher peak prices are more difficult to recover.

(For a few more charts indicating that a comin! g gold & ldquo;trigger” that may make prices explode, click here.)

If you're concerned about the long breather and considering selling your gold, read what Dylan Grice, strategist at Société Générale, says about it first:

"Eventually, there will be a crisis of such magnitude that the political winds change direction, and become blustering gales forcing us onto the course of fiscal sustainability," says Dylan Grice, strategist at Société Générale in his new Popular Delusions report for clients.

"Until it does, the temptation to inflate will remain, as will economists with spurious mathematical rationalisations as to why such inflation will make everything OK...Until [then], the outlook will remain favorable for gold. But eventually, majority opinion will accept the painful contractionary medicine because it will have to. That will be the time to sell gold."

If you're in it for the long haul, history tells us you'll reap more long-term rewards if you can trudge through and ignore the recent sell-off panic.