Is Gold a good investment now? It has gone up ~50% this year

If that is indeed true, best time to buy gold was a year ago. It can be a great investment, but one cannot judge good or bad investment only the basis of recent returns.

Past performance is not indicative of future returns. If you pick assets after they have performed well, you'd most likely miss out on assets that performs well after you have invested in it.

If Gold has gone up 50% this year, right time to invest in it would've been 1 year ago.

Instead, question your asset selection process: is your selection criteria good enough for it to have picked Gold as an investment a year ago?

In other words, what were Gold's 1Y / 3 Y / 5Y / 10Y returns, 1 year ago on this date? Most likely, it won't have been good, and you'd have passed on that.

Chasing past returns, hoping for a repeat of performance, is called return chasing. It's common among new investors, but even veteran investors fall prey to this. As a rule of thumb, avoid greed in decision making.

This is not to say Gold is a bad investment for next 1Y / 3Y / 5Y. It might be, it might not be. But the fact that Gold has surged in price in recent times; is not a good reason to invest in Gold.