The global gold market has recently attracted a lot of attention and the price of gold is relatively higher
than its historical trend. For mining companies to mitigate risk and uncertainty in gold price
fluctuations, make hedging, future investment and evaluation decisions, depend on forecasting future
price trends. The first section of this paper reviews the world gold market and the historical trend of
gold prices from January 1968 to December 2008. This is followed by an investigation into the
relationship between gold price and other key influencing variables, such as oil price and global
inflation over the last 40 years. The second section applies a modified econometric version of the longterm
trend reverting jump and dip diffusion model for forecasting natural-resource commodity prices.
This method addresses the deficiencies of previous models, such as jumps and dips as parameters and
unit root test for long-term trends. The model proposes that historical data of mineral commodities
have three terms to demonstrate fluctuation of prices: a long-term trend reversion component,
a diffusion component and a jump or dip component. The model calculates each term individually to
estimate future prices of mineral commodities. The study validates the model and estimates the gold
price for the next 10 years, based on monthly historical data of nominal gold price