Analysis Topic: Commodity Markets - Metals, Softs & Oils
The analysis published under this topic are as follows.Wednesday, July 26, 2023
Global Copper market is entering an age of extremely large deficits / Commodities / Copper
Simply put, the road to reaching net zero begins and ends with copper. All infrastructure built to support renewable energy uses large amounts of copper, as the metal is a highly efficient conductor of electricity and heat.
To keep the energy transition going, millions of feet of copper wiring will be required for strengthening the world’s power grids, and hundreds of thousands of tonnes more are needed to build wind and solar farms. An offshore wind turbine, for example, contains 8 tonnes of copper per megawatt of generation capacity.
Electric vehicles, now a fast-rising source of demand, use over twice as much copper as gasoline-powered cars, which contain about 30 kg. Not to mention, there is more than 180 kg of copper in the average home, reminding us just how indispensable the metal really is.
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Monday, July 24, 2023
Are Silver’s Liquidity Dreams a Mirage? / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2023
The white metal is priced for an economic outcome that’s unlikely to materialize.
AI Optimism
With liquidity-fueled assets outperforming in 2023, they’ve decided that QT and higher interest rates are not going to spoil their party. Moreover, with silver and gold also liquidity beneficiaries, they have adopted similar attitudes. However, while the gambit can persist in the short term, a major climax should unfold over the medium term.
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Monday, July 24, 2023
Gold Stocks Technical Breakout / Commodities / Gold and Silver Stocks 2023
Gold-stock technicals are dramatically improving, turning increasingly bullish. After slumping to major support zones in the summer doldrums, the gold miners’ stocks have surged sharply in the past couple weeks. That strong advance has achieved a decisive breakout above the main gold-stock benchmark’s key 50-day moving average. Similar breakouts in recent years have heralded imminent big sector rallies.
Gold-stock price action has been really interesting lately, so I’ve written several recent essays analyzing it. Between late September to mid-April, the leading GDX gold-stock ETF powered 63.9% higher in 6.5 months. That amplified gold’s underlying parallel 25.7% upleg by 2.5x, right in the middle of the major gold stocks’ usual leverage range of 2x to 3x. Then gold rolled over into a healthy pullback in early May.
GDX closed just shy of a new upleg high on May 4th, the day gold hit its own latest of $2,050. But with gold getting seriously overbought and greed growing excessive, the yellow metal reversed to work off both conditions. So over the next 1.8 months into late June, gold pulled back 6.9% to $1,908. That perfectly-normal mid-upleg selloff was right in line with February’s 7.2% pullback, and restored sentiment balance.
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Thursday, June 29, 2023
Can We Live in a World without Silver? / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2023
The World Silver Survey is an annual report published by The Silver Institute since 1990. It provides market participants with supply and demand statistics for critical sectors of the silver market, along with price and trade data.
The 2022 World Silver Survey reported a global silver deficit of 154 million ounces, the most significant since 2015. The 2023 World Silver Survey reported a global silver deficit of 129 million ounces, the second-largest since 2015.
Tuesday, June 20, 2023
Inflation is Expected to do What?! Implications for Gold. / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2023
The markets just assumed a dovish U-turn in interest rates, thinking that the inflation problem is handled. The below chart features the inflation that’s expected in one year.
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Sunday, June 18, 2023
Silver Hangs on by a Thread / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2023
As anxiety grips the white metal, is a retest of the 2023 lows or highs more likely?
With the Fed’s hawkish crusade helping to suppress gold, silver, and mining stocks, the permabulls have gone from loud to quiet. Moreover, with resilient demand supporting inflation and keeping the pressure on the Fed, we warned on Mar. 31, 2022, that consumer spending would cause problems for the central bank. We wrote:
There is a misnomer in the financial markets that inflation is a supply-side phenomenon. In a nutshell: COVID-19 restrictions, labor shortages, and manufacturing disruptions are the reasons for inflation’s reign. As such, when these issues are no longer present, inflation will normalize and the U.S. economy will enjoy a “soft landing.”
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Friday, June 16, 2023
Fed Rate Hold is a Game-changer for the Price of Gold! / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2023
Yesterday’s FOMC and the following press conference were groundbreaking. Rates stayed, but Fed said about raising them twice this year = no U-turn!
This is a game-changer because so many investors were still believing in a quick, dovish U-turn. And those dreams were just dispelled. The fact that rates were not hiked yesterday doesn’t matter as much as the fact that their expected future path is still to the upside.
While the core CPI didn’t move recently, inflation is moving down. With inflation moving down and interest rates going higher, what does that imply?
Tuesday, May 16, 2023
Silver Price May Explode / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2023
Approximately 12 years ago, I wrote my first public market prognostication and it was focused on gold. At the time, gold was enjoying a parabolic rally, and the discussion amongst the general public was how far past the $2,000 mark gold was going to strike during that rally.
So, on Aug. 11, 2011, I concluded my first gold article as follows:
"Again, since we are most probably in the final stages of this parabolic fifth wave "blow-off-top," I would seriously consider anything approaching the $1,915 level to be a potential target for a top at this time."
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Tuesday, May 16, 2023
The Crypto Signal for the Precious Metals Market / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2023
What if bitcoin just topped? What does it change for the price of gold going forward, if anything?
Many years ago, people wanted to buy gold but didn’t really want to store it in their homes, pay for safekeeping and insurance during transport, and so on. The demand gap was filled by all sorts of e-gold, e-bullion, and overall pooled accounts. This idea might seem odd to those, who are new to the precious metals market, and writing about it does make me recall that scene from the Lord of the Rings movie.
- “I was there, Gandalf, 3000 years ago…”
Says Elrond, while describing the weakness of men and how it contributed to Middle Earth’s status quo.
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Sunday, April 30, 2023
Silver Doesn’t Care, but You Should / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2023
While calling the top is a process that plays out over time, silver’s momentum has fizzled, and the next major move should be to the downside. To explain, we wrote on Apr. 21:Read full article... Read full article...
Saturday, April 29, 2023
Could the Debt Ceiling Drama Uplift Gold Price? / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2023
While the 2011 analog paints an optimistic portrait for gold, silver and mining stocks, a re-enactment of the last debacle is unlikely to unfold this time around. Back then, gold soared amid the debt ceiling chaos, while the USD Index was a major casualty. And while it’s possible lawmakers could ignite a similar event, most learn from their past mistakes.For example, while bloated stock valuations were the Black Swan in 2000, the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC) was a housing market phenomenon, while the 2020 pandemic was a health scare. As a result, different catalysts often cause distress, and when this recession arrives, it will likely be driven by something investors least expect.
So, with the debt ceiling drama highly anticipated, it reduces the odds of the event unfolding in line with investors’ expectations. Therefore, it’s likely more semblance than substance, and the bulk of the PMs’ rallies should be in the rearview.
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Saturday, April 29, 2023
Gold Price Erased Its April Rally – What’s Next? / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2023
April had started with gold at $1,990, then gold moved as high as $2,063.40, and yesterday, it closed at $1,999. At the moment of writing these words, gold futures (because that’s what you see on the above chart) are trading at $1,993.
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Monday, April 10, 2023
Wall Street Cheerleaders Offer Perpetually Changing Arguments against Gold / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2023
As the gold market marches toward new records, it is proving the naysayers wrong and vindicating longtime bulls.
Gold posted a record high close on a quarterly basis at the end of March. Now the monetary metal has its sights set on setting a new all-time high here in the coming days.
That’ll have to wait until next week though as global markets are closed here on this Good Friday. Gold will finish this week at $2,020 an ounce after advancing 2.1% this week. Silver, meanwhile, gained 3.7% to bring spot prices to $25.30 an ounce.
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Monday, April 03, 2023
Why Gold? / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2023
If the decades old bubble in paper assets is ending, that’s why gold!Various promotions along the way of the Continuum have distilled the case for gold down to handy buzz phrases like “got Gold?” as if it were a carton of milk. Other promotions have presented gold as the go-to asset through all types of macro phases, from “fiat is gonna blow up any day now” to “inflation is gonna eat your future” to “a deflationary Armageddon is on the way”.
Yet all along the Continuum, policymakers papered it over, inflated the mess at every crisis as long as the Continuum allowed.*
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Saturday, April 01, 2023
Crude Oil: Will "Banking Crisis Send Prices Even Lower"? Ha! / Commodities / Crude Oil
SVB failed in March. Oil was destined to fall as early as February – here’s why;
The failures of Silicon Valley Bank, Silvergate Bank and Signature Bank have prompted a lot of discussion about the potential of a domino effect. People are wondering "what's next?"
The financial press is linking just about every downward price move in just about every financial market to the woes in the banking sector.
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Wednesday, March 29, 2023
China’s Gold Gambit: Outfoxing America on the World Stage? / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2023
By Jon Forrest Little,
Unless you live under a rock (and some days I wish I did), all eyes are on which bank will fail next.
We knew this was coming. Decades of Zero Interest Rate Policy, QE, and risky fractional reserve practices have consequences.
Superpowers like Russia and China are eyeing America’s financial vulnerabilities while the Fed, Congress, Treasury, and Wall Street play musical chairs and trip over each other like Keystone cops.
Wednesday, March 29, 2023
The last time this happened, Gold Price Soared for 10 years / Commodities / Gold and Silver Stocks 2023
Justin Spittler : 615% gains the last time this was triggered… “This is incredibly bullish”… “Someone big” is loading up… I’m no gold bug, but…
- Gold is closing in on its all-time highs.
On Monday, gold broke above $2,000 per ounce—the highest it’s been in over a year:
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Friday, March 24, 2023
Battle Line Drawn: Gold Bulls Look to Push through $2,000 / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2023
Gold prices surged to test the $2,000/oz level early this week before retreating ahead of the Federal Reserve's interest rate decision.
Fed policymakers opted for another 25 basis-point hike -- disappointing investors who had hoped for a pause in the wake of high-profile bank runs.
Stocks sold off in post-Fed trading on Wednesday afternoon. Precious metals markets, however, managed to record gains for the day.
Fed chairman Jerome Powell signaled that the central bank would likely hike one more time.
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Monday, March 06, 2023
Silver’s Subtle Indication / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2023
Namely, while the GDXJ (upper part of the chart) moved only a little above its recent high, silver has pretty much doubled its previous short-term upswing.
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Sunday, February 26, 2023
Gold Price Is ALMOST Ready to Rally / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2023
Enough is enough. No market can decline without correcting every now and then. And both gold and the USDX point to an upcoming reversal.
Let’s start with gold.
Is It Over?
Looking at its price from a short-term point of view, we see that it paused for a brief moment at its 38.2% Fibonacci retracement level.
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