Early 2009 was in some ways very similar to the setup that we have now. The stock market had just crashed. Gold had just rallied several hundred dollars (although in the case of early 2009 the large rally was following a late 2008 collapse in the price of metals).
Looking back at early 2009 and Gold stocks were a good buy. It's during this period that I first started trading precious metal stocks (after buying the metals themselves heavily into the late 2008 price dip) and to this day I still wish that I had just bought as many as I could at the outlandishly low prices and held them until today.
You might be wondering what I mean by saying take a look at stocks relative to the price of Gold. If you take a Gold stock index and divide it into the price of Gold we get a ratio that you can use as a measure of fair value to calculate whether it's worth buying the metals or related stocks (using the ratio along with other factors of course). It's much the same as the way some investors divide the price of Silver into Gold (resulting in the Gold/Silver ratio or GSR) to work out whether Gold or Silver is the better value at the time.
