Over the past three years, gold has found itself in an odd place: while it still remains the ultimate "safety" trade and store of value should everything go to hell following social and monetary collapse, when it comes to "coolness" it has been displaced by various cryptocurrencies, all of which have vastly outperformed the yellow metal in recent months.

Meanwhile, central banks continue to pressure the price of gold to avoid a repeat of 2011 when gold nearly broke out above $2,000, putting the fate world's "reserve currency" increasingly under question. As a result, gold has traded in a rather somnolent fashion, range bound between $1,100 and $1,300 over the last few years, failing to break out on either side.

But is that a fair price for gold?

That is the question Deutsche Bank's Grant Sporre set out to answer in a special report released overnight, which among other things finds that gold is a "metal" full of paradoxes.

Here is what Deutsche Bank found: as Sporre contends, in order to determine whether gold is cheap or expensive, one must first define what gold actually is.