While many experts turned bearish on gold as it dropped 28 percent last year, its biggest fall in 32 years, there are some holdouts who are bullish on the metal.

Comex February gold contracts stood at $1,237.70 an ounce Tuesday morning. Spot gold has rallied in the first three trading sessions of the year, as traders took advantage of low prices to buy.

As for the bullish case for gold, Bradley George, head of commodities & resources at Investec, tells The Wall Street Journal that continuing tapering by the Federal Reserve is mostly priced in to gold.

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That means the metal could rise if tapering doesn't play out as smoothly as some investors anticipate. The Fed announced last month that it would cut its bond purchases by $10 billion a month, leaving them at $75 billion.

Meanwhile, John Meyer, an analyst at SP Angel, tells The Journal he is encouraged by gold's ability to withstand heavy sales of exchange-traded gold funds without falling further in price.

Physical demand from China and India has buoyed the metal, and financial shocks, especially in Europe, could lift it higher, he explains.

Ed Moy, chief strategist at Morgan Gold, an Irvine, Calif.-based investment firm, says that while gold has room to drop further in the short term, it's headed higher over the long run.

"When you take a look at gold at $1,200 [about where gold ended 2013] that's a relative bargain compared to all the overpriced stocks," he tells Bloomberg.

"And given the extremely strong demand from Asia, which was at an historic high last year, those should put some upward pressure on gold in the long term."

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