As stock markets plunged, why didn't gold rise?

Twitter may have been encouraging investors to buy gold as U.S. stocks opened deeply in the red Monday morning, but investors weren't listening.

Typically seen as a safe-haven asset, the yellow metal tends to rise when the market suffers but Monday gold finished the day at $1153.40 an ounce, down 0.53%. That snaps a three-session winning streak and is gold's largest one-day percentage decline since Aug. 13, according to data from Dow Jones.

Meanwhile, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) plunged more than 1,000 points Monday morning before recovering some of its losses to close down 588.4 points, or 3.6%.

Gold is down 9.7% from a year ago and down 38.93% from its record high of $1888.70, hit in 2011.

"There should be some sort of safe-haven appeal," said Kristoffer Inton, an equity analyst at Morningstar. But for gold, investor fatigue seems to have set in. Gold last month hit a five-year low, and Inton says investors nowadays are more willing to explore other safe places for their money.

Part of what's holding back gold prices are worries about when the Fed might finally initiate its first interest rate hike in a decade and as inflation remains muted.

"Gold does best when inflation is higher than interest rates because it stores value and doesn’t earn anything," Inton explained.

China is also likely to blame: "We haven’t seen a huge gold rally in recent years without China," Yahoo Finance's Michael Santoli said in the video above.

China, whose volatile Shanghai Composite slid 8.5% to start the week, is one of the world's largest gold consumers. "More than half of end-user demand for gold is in jewelry, and a lot of that goes to India and China," Inton said. 

A rally in gold prices last week also was likely a factor, said Ralph Aldis, a portfolio manager with U.S. Global Investors.  "The market was anticipating something going on," Aldis said.

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