($GOLD) Archives

Has Gold Had It?

With the Federal Reserve signaling yesterday that QE3 is off the table, many traders are now betting that the barbarous relic is about to take a prolonged vacation.

Without a dividend or an interest yield in a world desperate for cash flow, the yellow metal suddenly doesn?t have so much to offer. Take away the fear of inflation that our deflationary reality assures, and gold is suddenly left wanting, along with all other hard assets. Uncle Buck becomes the big man on campus.

For the first time in many years, gold is ranking high on the list of preferred hedge fund shorts. The US Treasury?s sale of America eagle one ounce gold coins is down 70% from last year and is now plumbing a four year low. Open interest in the gold futures market has hit a 2 ? year low, indicating that capital is fleeing the market. This is usually what happens before prices die.

Physical markets in Asia, long a bulwark in the gold bull case, are suffering from declining volumes. India, long the world?s largest buyer of physical gold, just doubled import taxes, causing widespread strikes among jewelers.

Industry experts have been warning me for some time that the scrapage rate was soaring, thanks to retail gold buying shops popping up on almost every other street corner, and it was just a matter of time before this would have a major dampening effect on prices.? Remember those stories about gold coin vending machines popping up around the world? You don?t hear those anymore.

Indeed, the gold miners have been signaling for some time that the gold bugs were about to suffer a healthy dose of insecticide. Look no further than the chart for Barrack Gold (ABX), the world largest producer of the yellow metal, and a woeful underperformer compared to its benchmark product. Other miners have fared far worse.

Take speculation about future gold price appreciation away, and all of a sudden miners don?t have such a great business model. The problem is that they are not making gold anymore. Companies are having to dig deeper in more dangerous and inaccessible parts of the world, and pay bigger bribes to get there. (ABX) isn?t opening a new mines at 15,000 feet in the Andes because their like the fresh air and the scenery. Freezing water, and essential ingredient in the mining process, has become a major problem.

There is the added dilemma that the inventory sitting in the back of the shop is now falling in value instead of increasing. Barrack has made a big deal about abandoning its gold hedging strategy. That worked great for the past three years, but may not do as well going forward.

Cost inflation suffered by mining companies is the highest in the industrial world, and is now running at about a 20% annual rate, be it for labor, heavy equipment, infrastructure development, royalty fees, and so on. The tires for those giant trucks used in mining now cost $100,000 each and have a three year waiting list. The secondary market for them is booming.

It doesn?t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the technical picture for gold has been rapidly deteriorating. Gold has suffered an 8% sell off since the end of February, and is now up only 6% in 2012, underperforming most other asset classes. Look at the chart below, and the most charitable thing you can say is that with are approaching the bottom end of a $1,500-$1,925 range. But look at the longer term charts and it is clear that we have just witnessed a head and shoulders formation that has dramatically failed.

The chip shot on the downside for gold here is $1,500. More aggressive traders may want to reach for $1,450. Bring a double dip scare for the economy into the picture, which I expect to see this summer, and $1,100 is a possibility. If you get a real stock market crash in 2013, as many analysts are predicting, and you?ll get another chance to buy at $750.

Use the periodic short term bursts of buying, that are increasingly being seen by the trading community as a contrarian trade, as a great chance to leg into short dated puts on the SPDR Gold Trust Shares ETF (GLD).

Long term, I still like gold and expect it to hit the old inflation adjusted high of $2,300 during the next hard asset buying binge. But remember also that long term, we are all dead.

Watch Out for Gold?s Fatal Attraction

April 4, 2012/by DougD

Cross Market Correlations Are Breaking Down

Diary

Today was a real head scratcher for long time market observers, including myself. Cross market correlations that have served me so well this year are breaking down, and their predictive power has suddenly gone blind. I blame this on the liquidity drought that has plagued the market since the beginning of the month that has confined markets to frustratingly narrow ranges.

There are many reasons for the sudden opacity. The usual seasonal flight to the sidelines seems more pronounced than in years past, as many managers attempt to put a dreadful year behind them. There is still $500 million in trading capital missing from traders who used MF Global as a prime broker. This is especially felt in the energy and metals markets where MF had such a large presence.

High frequency traders have also decamped for more fertile climes in the oil and foreign exchange markets. And we all know that the big hedge funds are getting redemptions, cutting them off at the knees until January.

I?ll give you a few examples. Falling stock markets almost always produce a rising volatility index. But today it fell as low as 23%, a five month low, and closed at only 25.4% even with the Dow off 66 points. The correlation between stocks and gold has been almost perfect since the summer. But the barbarous relic has been in free fall since yesterday with the S&P 500 essentially unchanged. Ditto with the Euro, which managed a two cent plunge today.

The larger question for traders is whether this is a onetime only breakdown in cross market linkages that will end in January, or is it the beginning of a more permanent continental drift. We will find out next month when the ?A? Team managers return to the market and volume recovers.

Let me toss an alternative theory out there. It appears that the year to date returns for all asset classes are rapidly converging on zero. That?s why assets like gold and silver with the great 12 month returns are having the biggest falls this week. The S&P 500 is now down 2.2% on the year, and the Euro is up a miniscule 1.1%. Gold is still hanging on to a 17% gain, while silver is up only 12%, both rapidly headed towards single digits

Is this the inevitable result of a ?no return? world? Sounds like I better stay out of the market in this performance sapping environment, lest my own profits go up in a puff of smoke.

The ?A? Team Traders Are Gone Until January

December 13, 2011/by DougD

?RISK OFF? Strikes Again

Diary

You would think that this was going to be a good day. Weekly jobless claims fell to 388,000, a new six month low. New permits for home construction in October were up 10.2%. The October CPI even fell by 0.1%.

But the second that Spanish bond yields spiked, it was all over but the crying. The S&P 500 opened weak, and then proceeded to plunged 25 points, decisively breaking a triangle to the downside on the charts that has been narrowing for the past three weeks. Once again, improving fundamentals in the US were trumped by contagion fears in Europe. If you don?t bounce off the 50 day moving average on Friday, then we?ll be on the Lexington Avenue Downtown Express to 1,150 or worse.

The ?RISK OFF? nature of the move across all asset classes could not have been more clear. Oil skidded by $5, gold gave up $65, silver pared $2.20, copper gave back 15 cents. Ten year Treasuries, which never believed in this ?RISK ON? rally for two seconds, received a nice little boost, but not as much as you might expect. Perhaps we are near a top in this most bubblicious of asset classes? In the meantime, the (TBT) was beaten like a red headed stepchild.

One cannot underestimate the impact of the bankruptcy of MF Global, which has deprived the market of $600 million of trading capital. It is particularly serious in the metals and energies, where MF was particularly active. Hence the gut churning moves. The peripatetic CNBC commentator and Tea Party founder, Rick Santelli, is finding out that ?let the chips fall where they may? means that all his friends on the Chicago CME floor get fired.

Strangely, the Euro, the currency that everyone loves to hate, was one of the best performing assets of the day, down less than a penny. The headline risk here is huge. Will the European Central Bank continue buying enough bonds? Forex traders tell me this is because of a number of temporary, one off factors like European bank repatriation of funds back into Euros to shore up their balance sheets and Asian and Middle Eastern central bank purchases of high yield PIIGS bonds. The second shoe has yet to fall on this beleaguered means of exchange.

November 18, 2011/by DougD

What?s Up With Gold?

Diary

Have you ever held a basketball underwater in a swimming pool and let go? It flies to the upside and pops you in the nose. That is exactly what gold is doing now. After the barbarous relic peaked at $1,922 on August 24, it traded like an absolute pig, giving up 20% in a matter of weeks. I managed to coin it with a couple of quick in and out trades in (GLD) puts, some doubling over a weekend. So much for the ?safe asset? theory.

You can thank hedge fund titan, John Paulsen, for the action. John gained international notoriety when he earned a $4 billion bonus after making huge bets against subprime loans going into the housing crash.

Since then, his touch has grown somewhat icy. He started out 2011 with a huge, bullish bet on US banks, a play, I confess, I never really understood. This was back when Bank of America (BAC) was trading at a lofty $14/share. As a hedge, he backed up these gargantuan positions with big holdings in gold, which quickly made him the largest owner of the ETF (GLD).

John?s P&L held up reasonably well during the first part of the year. As the banks faded, gold went from strength to strength, limiting his damage. That all changed on April 29 when global financial markets flipped into ?RISK OFF? mode and gold melted along with everything else. Its hedging capability proved to be nil. By August, John?s losses approached a near death 50%.

Needless to say, his investors failed to see the humor in the situation, and rumors of cataclysmic redemptions started sweeping the street. By implication, this could only mean large scale liquidation of the yellow metal. This was happening when the rest of the hedge fund industry was catching daily margin calls, forcing them to dump even more gold into a downward spiral, their best performing holding for the year. When the sushi hits the fan, you sell what you can, not what you want to. By the time the carnage ended, gold was down $392.

When the crying was over, Paulson had reduced his ownership in the ETF (GLD) from 31.5 million shares to 20.3 million. That?s a haircut of $1.76 billion of the shiny stuff. In the end, Paulson says he only suffered redemptions of 10% of his somewhat reduced funds, much lower than expected.

Gold actually anticipated the new ?RISK ON? trade by a week, bottoming on September 26. Since then it has behaved like a paper asset, tracking the S&P 500 almost tick for tick, adding a quick 19.6%. So, what?s up with gold?

As we approach yearend, the downward pressure of this redemption selling is waning, hence my basketball analogy. New bull arguments have also come to the fore. The contagion in Europe has prompted massive buying of all precious metals by panicky individuals, including silver (SLV), platinum (PPLT), palladium (PALL), and even neglected rhodium, with a collapse of the Euro imminent. And how will the ECB eventually end the crisis? With a continental TARP and quantitative easing, which we here in the US already know is hugely positive for gold prices.

How far will the gold get this time? The gold bugs say we?re going to break the old high and power on through to the inflation adjusted high at $2,300. I?m not so sure. I am not willing to bet the ranch here on an asset class that could plunge $1,000 going into the next recession, which could be just around the corner.

But there may be a trade here in precious metals space for the nimble. My pick has been to buy lagging silver, which offers much more bang per buck if the sector starts to build a head of steam. The white metal will not get hit with IMF gold sales, which are also a rumored part of any European bailout package.

November 15, 2011/by DougD

Silver Is Starting to Shine

Diary

I received an urgent call from my friend at Fidelitrade (http://fidelitrade.com/) this morning, a leading dealer in 1,000 ounce bars of gold and silver. He had just been cleaned out of the 1,000 ounce silver bars at $34,930 each, and there was nothing in the pipeline. What the hell was going on with silver?

I tried to calm him down with my usual measured, rational, global, cross asset class explanation, and made the following points:

*An interim solution, or at least some progress, seems imminent in the European debt crisis. Any solution means a European style quantitative easing and a TARP, and we here in the US already know how positive those can be for risk assets.

*My friend at the Swiss National Bank told me yesterday that this resolution should send the Euro down to parity against the dollar (click here for ?Get Ready to Short the Euro Again?). This is prompting massive European buying by panicky individuals across the entire precious metals spectrum. That?s where his silver 1,000 ounce bars went.

*Now that gold is, in effect, a paper asset, it can ride on the coattails of American stocks in a rally that now looks to carry on until year end, and possibly into January.

*My meeting with the Chinese government last week confirmed my belief that the People?s Bank of China is going to sit on the bid for gold and silver looking to increase their holdings of hard assets as a hedge against a weak dollar in a future recession. At least this is what I told them to do.

*When I went to buy a stack of Chinese one ounce silver panda coins in Shenzhen, there was a one hour wait at the store. I usually buy a dozen of these to use as tips and bribes to buy my way across the Middle Kingdom to get the information I need. When I asked others in line why they were buying, they told me they were moving money out of real estate into silver because of the recent sharp markdowns in new condo prices. Gold coins are too expensive for someone who earns only $500 a month.

*Gold seems to be taking another run at the old high of $1,922. If the ?RISK ON? trade continues, it might even make it. Then the hot money will rotate into the next natural target, silver, which has so far lagged gold?s move. That makes silver a great ?catch up? play.

*The technical set up for silver is looking really interesting. As I write this with the (SLV) at $33.60, it looks like we are just about to break the 50 day moving average to the upside. If successful, then the 200 day moving average at $35.60 is a chip shot. Break that, and we could fill in the $10 of air on the chart created by the September crash and gap all the way up to the old high, just short of $50.

*Having discounted a recession over the summer that was never going to happen, risk assets are now ?undiscounting? it.

*In the meantime, economic data across a broad front are going from flat to showing a gradual improvement. Corporate earnings that were expected to grow at 13% actually came in closer to 17%. Since 50% of the final demand for silver is for industrial purposes, this is a great play on a recovery.

*Traders are getting sick to death of listening to all of this BS about Europe, which is largely being exaggerated by journalists jonesing from free continental vacations. Ignore Europe, just buy the dips in all risk assets, and turn off CNBC.

My friend said thanks, and indicated that he would spend the afternoon scouring the marketplace for more silver bars and coins of any description, promising to renew his subscription to Macro Millionaire.

The conversation prompted me to do a quickie analysis of the options market and look for some inviting plays. Since I am 80% in cash, and up 47% on the year, I have plenty of room to take a flyer here. That led me to the Silver ETF (SLV) January $35 calls. Here are the numbers I came up with:

*A run up to just the 200 day moving average takes the $35 calls to $3.00, up 33%.

*A move to fill the September gap takes silver to $39 and the options to $5.00, up 120%.

*A run to the old high under $50 takes the options to $15, assuming there is no time premium left by the time we get there, a return of 670%.

I am going to use a stop loss here of $30 on the underlying. Those who can?t do options, just buying the (SLV) ETF outright here makes a ton of sense. Adrenaline junkies can even consider the double leveraged silver ETF (AGQ). Just make sure you fasten your seat belt.

The Silver Panda

Please Take a Number and Wait in Line

November 9, 2011/by DougD

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