Sentiment is waning ahead of this week's Precious Metals Summit and next week's Denver Gold Forum.

The gold price sat at over US$1350 an ounce in January but has fallen over the course of the year and currently has been struggling to hold above $1200/oz.

At the same time, the Australian dollar gold price of around A$1670/oz is flat for the year.

Australian gold producers have enjoyed a re-rating this year, which miners at Diggers & Dealers last month put down to robust balance sheets and strong operational performance.

But outside the bubble of the Australian mid-tiers, the gold space is a relatively miserable place.

The GDX index is down by around 22%, while the ASX 300 gold index is down by around 7% comparatively.

Last month, Vanguard announced it was renaming its $2.3 billion Vanguard Precious Metals and Mining Fund to Vanguard Global Capital Cycles Fund to broaden its focus to infrastructure assets in telecommunications and utilities, while maintaining a "meaningful exposure" to previous metals and mining stocks.

"After careful analysis of the performance and usage of the Precious Metals and Mining Fund, we are restructuring the portfolio and changing the advisor to improve investor outcomes," Vanguard CEO Tim Buckley said.

Evolution Mining executive chairman Jake Klein said it felt as if sentiment in the global gold space was as low as it had been since 2013.

"Yet the Canadian dollar is not dissimilar to the Australian, so you'd have to ask the question, why are the Australian gold producers having such success in mining operations in Australia and making so much money? Why isn't that being reflected in some of the results delivered by other companies?" he said earlier this month in Sydney.

"We're not naïve enough to think that we're better miners or better skilled - I don't know what's happened but something has happened which has resulted in investors being legitimately disappointed by some of the results that have been delivered, and I suppose Australia you'd say they've been surprised to the upside."

Evolution and Northern Star Resources have risen by around 8% and 60% over the past 12 months respectively. Similar-sized Canadian peer Kinross Gold has lost more than 36%.

Canaccord Genuity managing director, global head - mining sales Greg Huffman told MNN that while Australian producers like Northern Star and Evolution had benefited from well-timed acquisitions, many of the larger North American gold companies had not had a mandate from their investors to do M&A.

In addition, he added the Canadian sector had a number of high-profile issues over the past two years.

Operational and geopolitical issues with a number of companies had impacted shareholder confidence, Huffman said.

All of that misery has led to an increase in shareholder activism in North America.

At last year's Denver Gold Forum, Paulson & Co partner Marcelo Kim accused the world's top gold miners of "serial value destruction" and said gold investors behaved like "sheep being led to slaughter" due to the lack of activism.

Paulson vowed to form the Shareholders Gold Council in response. It is unclear if the SGC has been launched (Paulson did not respond to a request for comment), though Reuters reported in June it was close to being unleashed.

Meanwhile, Paulson has been embroiled in a bitter row with Toronto-listed Detour Gold, in which it is a major shareholder.

The hedge fund's founder, billionaire John Paulson, sent a critical letter to the board in June, requesting a management overhaul to improve the performance of the underperforming Detour Lake mine in Ontario, or even a sale.

In July, Paulson doubled down, confirming it would move forward with efforts to replace a majority of Detour's board and urged the miner to disclose that it had been approached by a major gold mining company interested a potential acquisition, saying Detour's interim CEO Michael Kenyon had disclosed the information in an unsolicited email.

In response, Detour described Paulson's efforts as "a desperate attempt to resuscitate its flailing reputation" and said it had misinformed the investment community.

The ugly war of words has continued since then, with Paulson angry that the shareholder vote it pushed for this month won't occur until December.

Paulson has nominated eight directors, including Kim, to replace the current board.

Last week it stepped up its campaign, launching a website, shareholdersfordetour.com, and sending a letter to shareholders signed by John Paulson.

Bloomberg reported that Van Eck is backing Paulson's push, while Detour's recent press release included a quote of support from Franco-Nevada chairman Pierre Lassonde.

Meanwhile, activist short seller Viceroy Research released a report last week on another struggling North American miner, Pretium Resources, operator of the high-grade Brucejack mine in British Columbia.

"Viceroy is short Pretium Resources, as our research suggests its mining results have been distorted and the equity likely worthless as the over-indebted company bleeds cash over the next 12 months," Viceroy said in a report.

Pretium's shares fell 10% following the release of the report. While the company hasn't formally addressed Viceroy's claims, it corrected numbers released in a 2017 reclamation report, which Viceroy described as a "badly thought-out attempt at damage control".

Last Tuesday, Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz filed a federal securities class action lawsuit in New York against Pretium on behalf of shareholders who purchase stock between July 2016 and September 2018.

Meanwhile Canada's New Gold, which exited Australia this year via the sale of Peak to Aurelia Metals, has lost 70% over the past year as it struggles to hit targets at its Rainy River mine in Ontario.

Reuters reported last week that the company, with the assistance of BMO Capital Markets, was trying to find a buyer.

All of these issues and others were keeping generalist investors away from the sector, Huffman said.

In a positive sign, Denver Gold Group executive Tim Wood said next week's Denver Gold Forum had a "significant influx of new investors, many of whom are generalists".

Whether they can be lured back to the sector remains to be seen.

"What I can say is gold investors are a pretty miserable bunch unless you have exposure to Australian gold producers," Klein said.