Analysis Topic: Commodity Markets - Metals, Softs & Oils
The analysis published under this topic are as follows.Sunday, October 08, 2023
Silver Bulls Are the Walking Wounded / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2023
Silver has been a major underperformer in recent months, as the white metal proved no match for higher real yields and a stronger USD Index.
With silver gunning for its 2023 lows, the recent sell-off has done severe technical damage. And while the weakness has been a boon for our GDXJ ETF short position, silver could enjoy a meaningful bounce in the weeks ahead. Yet, the technicals are much better than the fundamentals at uncovering support and resistance, and our premium Gold Trading Alert has all of those details.
Sunday, October 01, 2023
Gold Market Gyrate on U.S. Government Shutdown Theatrics / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2023
Precious metals markets got hammered earlier this week as interest rates continued their relentless march higher.
The 10-year Treasury note recorded its highest yield since 2007. Meanwhile, the average conventional 30-year mortgage rate surged to 7.31% -- a level not seen since 2000.
Higher rates are putting pressure on housing and financial markets. They are also hitting consumers and small businesses. For now, though, the economy hasn’t entered into a recession – at least not officially.
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Sunday, September 24, 2023
Dead Ends Ahead for Silver Price / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2023
With the fundamental roadblocks adding up, silver confronts a bearish outlook at nearly every turn.
With the FOMC’s hawked-up SEP and Powell’s inflation focus upending several risk assets, rising real interest rates continue to weaken silver’s bull thesis. And with the Fed chief promising more of the same on Sep. 20, higher interest rates and/or a recession are both bullish for the USD Index. Powell said:
“The worst thing we can do is to fail to restore price stability, because the record is clear on that. If you don’t restore price stability, inflation comes back and... you can have a long period where the economy is just very uncertain, and it’ll affect growth. It... can be a miserable period to have inflation come constantly coming back and the Fed coming in and having to tighten again and again.”
Sunday, September 24, 2023
Feds Seek Huge Royalties from Gold Miners in New Crackdown / Commodities / Gold and Silver Stocks 2023
Fears of inflation remaining stubbornly high, and interest rates going higher, rattled financial markets this past week.
On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve left its benchmark funds rate unchanged as expected. However, Fed chairman Jerome Powell left the door open for another hike in the near future. He also suggested rates may need to stay higher for longer than previously expected.
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Friday, September 22, 2023
Gold, Mining Stocks Weather Fed Interest Rates Hike Cycle / Commodities / Gold and Silver Stocks 2023
Fed hawkishness has been the rankling thorn in gold’s side for 18 months now. Since the Fed started this monster rate-hike cycle, every material gold and gold-stock selloff has been driven by the threat of more rate hikes. Those boost the US dollar, triggering gold-futures selling. But the Fed’s hawkish spell over traders is waning. Gold and the miners weathered this week’s latest hawkish FOMC meeting pretty well.
The Federal Open Market Committee catapulted its federal-funds rate up an extreme 525 basis points off zero in just 16.3 months into late July! That blasted the FFR to a lofty 22.4-year secular high of 5.38%. And this scorching rate-hike cycle was even more violent internally, with over 4/5ths of it happening in just 9.0 months into mid-December! The Fed has never before hiked so big and fast from such low levels.
The resulting higher US yields ignited a parabolic moonshot in the US dollar. In just 6.0 months into last September, the benchmark US Dollar Index skyrocketed 16.7%! The leveraged gold-futures speculators who dominate gold’s short-term price action closely watch the dollar’s fortunes for their trading cues, and do the opposite. So gold plummeted 20.9% in 6.6 months on heavy and relentless gold-futures dumping!
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Tuesday, September 12, 2023
Gold Price and Gold Stocks’ Loud Silence / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2023
What a beautiful nothing! Nothing really happened on the markets on Friday, but due to the context of the previous days’ actions, it was profound.
The thing is that it was a day when markets took a breather and verified their previous moves.
Some price moves are accidental or triggered by geopolitical events. Sometimes, the markets pretty much “have to” move in a certain direction because the only rational thing to do is given the event that is happening. For instance, if a war breaks out in Europe, gold rallies. But it doesn’t mean that it’s going to stay up for long. If the rally was simply reactive and not based on a broader trend, then the rally is going to be invalidated.
Saturday, August 19, 2023
Gold Stock Correction Finally Hits Target / Commodities / Gold and Silver Stocks 2023
The gold stock correction has been in play since GDX/HUI doubled topped in April-May
Gold Stock Correction From a Seasonal View
We begin this article, which updates the gold stock correction, as a platform for providing information requested by two NFTRH subscribers. Below are the recent seasonal tendencies for GDX. I’ve elected to use only the years from 2018 to current in order to keep the graph clean and to show that 2023 is shaping up per the norm in the post-pandemic era.
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Saturday, August 19, 2023
An Alien Invasion Will Cause Gold Price To Soar! / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2023
As many of you that follow my public articles likely know, I am an avid reader. And, from time to time, I will choose to read other public articles on various markets.
What truly burns my buns are articles that present market fallacies as the basis for their "analysis." And, sadly, this is all too commonly seen in the metals complex.
So, just the other day, I read an article that called for a major rally in gold primarily due to an expectation of China invading Taiwan. And, to just add a cherry on top, they noted that if that did not cause gold to rally, then it will rally due to it being a safe haven during market volatility/declines, due to inflation, due to the Fed lowering interest rates, due to central bank buying of gold, etc. In other words, they simply threw the kitchen sink of reasons as to why gold is going to rally in their eyes.
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Monday, August 14, 2023
U.S. Mint Bureaucrats Continue to Undermine the Once-Great American Eagle Brand / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2023
Precious metals markets are ticking lower this week amid an ongoing summer lull in investor demand.The upshot of soft market conditions for gold and silver is favorable buying opportunities for bargain hunters. Not only are spot prices down, but so are premiums on popular bullion products available through Money Metals.
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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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