Analysis Topic: Commodity Markets - Metals, Softs & Oils

The analysis published under this topic are as follows.

Thursday, June 18, 2020

Low Inflation Makes Powell a Dove. How It Affects Gold? / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2020

By: Arkadiusz_Sieron

Inflation remains low, while Powell signals dovish Fed for years. Good for gold.

The US CPI inflation rate declined 0.1 percent in May, following a 0.8 percent drop in April. The decrease was mainly driven by decreases in energy, transportation and apparel prices. The core CPI also declined 0.1 percent, following a 0.4 percent drop in April. It was the third consecutive monthly decline, which happened for the first time in history of the index that starts in 1957. Anyway, compared with the previous month, we see some stabilization of disinflation forces, at least on a monthly basis.

On annual basis, the overall CPI increased just 0.2 percent (seasonally adjusted and merely 0.1 percent without the seasonal adjustments), following 0.4 percent increase in April. It was the smallest 12-month increase since October 2015. The core CPI rose 1.2 percent over the last 12 months, compared to the 1.4 percent increase in the previous month. It was the smallest increase since March 2011. Both indices are substantially lower than a few months ago. The chart below shows these disinflationary trends.

Wednesday, June 17, 2020

Silver is Going to have a Sudden, Massive Move to $50 that will Suprise Everyone / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2020

By: MoneyMetals

Mike Gleason: It is my privilege now to welcome back Michael Pento president and founder of Pento Portfolio Services. Michael is a well-known money manager, market commentator, and author of the book, The Coming Bond Market Collapse: How to Survive the Demise of the U.S. Debt Market. He's been a regular guest with us over the years, and it's always a pleasure to have him on with us.

Michael, thanks for the time again today and welcome back.

Michael Pento: Thank you so much for having me back on Mike.

Mike Gleason: Well, Michael, it's been a few months since we've had you on last and just a little bit has been going on in the world. COVID-19 has hit the states to say the least and caused major disruptions in the economy. Governors have instituted stay-home orders. Tens of millions of people have filed for unemployment. Now we're seeing major rioting and social unrest in many cities throughout the country over the police killing of a black man in Minnesota last week.

Wednesday, June 17, 2020

Gold Stocks Investment Strong / Commodities / Gold and Silver Stocks 2020

By: Zeal_LLC

Gold investment demand remains strong, buoying the yellow metal and its miners’ stocks.  Investors have continued actively diversifying into gold despite soaring stock markets and weaker summer seasonals.  The Fed’s extreme money printing fueling these precarious stock-market heights is perilously inflationary, making upping gold portfolio allocations essential.  This ongoing capital shift is likely to keep pushing gold higher.

The dominant driver of gold’s major price trends is investment demand.  While it isn’t the largest demand category, it varies greatly depending on global-financial-market conditions.  The best global gold supply-and-demand data is only published quarterly by the venerable World Gold Council, in its must-read Gold Demand Trends reports.  They highlight the big volatility inherent in gold investment demand in recent years.

From 2015 to 2019, jewelry demand averaged 51.2% of overall gold demand.  But the biggest jewelry year out of the last 5 was only 1.2x the smallest one in tonnage-demand terms.  Investment demand only averaged 29.0% of overall gold demand in 2015 to 2019, yet the difference between the best and worst years in this span was 1.7x.  The WGC’s latest GDT on Q1’20 again proved how important investment is.

Wednesday, June 17, 2020

Silver Tops Gold in May, Setting up a Summer Surge / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2020

By: The_Gold_Report

Although the gold to silver ratio has tightened a bit, it remains elevated and could indicate more upside for silver, according to McAlinden Research Partners.

Silver and silver miners popped in May on the back of a rebound in industrial activity around the world. Ultra-low interest rates and expectations of a weaker dollar have compounded several political pressures that begun popping up at the end of the month. Though the gold to silver ratio has tightened a bit, it remains elevated and could indicate more upside for silver.

Silver futures capped a gain of nearly 24% for the month of May, the largest monthly gain since 2011. The metal jumped strongly on hopes of an upturn in industrial activity as economies around the world have begun to "reopen" in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Strong Demand Will Not Send Gold Price Higher / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2020

By: Kelsey_Williams

Gold is original money. As such, it is the measure of value for everything else.

Gold was money before the US dollar and other paper currencies. All paper currencies are substitutes for gold, i.e., real money.

So, how much is money worth? Money is worth what you can buy with it. In my article A Loaf Of Bread, A Gallon Of Gas, An Ounce Of Gold, I compared the cost to purchase bread and gasoline over the past one hundred years using US dollars vs. gold.

Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Gold Stocks Correction and Upcoming Opportunity / Commodities / Gold and Silver Stocks 2020

By: Gary_Tanashian

Before updating the status of the gold miner (HUI) correction, let’s take a quick review of the Macrocosm, because it’s always a good time to be clear on important macro considerations.

The graphic makes the following points that are the foundation of the NFTRH view on the right/wrong times to be fundamentally bullish on the gold stock sector. In order of priority, a bullish view needs:

Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Stocks Bulls Beware: A Dark Cloud Is Forming Over Oil Markets / Commodities / Crude Oil

By: OilPrice_Com

Bullish sentiment appears to have returned to the stock markets with a vengeance. In a historic rally that has taken even die-hard bulls by surprise, the S&P 500 has managed to claw back all of its 2020 losses, taking just 53 sessions for the index to fully restore the nearly $10T in value it shed in an epic bear market. The oil markets have been nearly as impressive.

After entering negative territory for the first time in history, U.S. WTI prices have briefly touched $40/bbl amid record production cuts and an uptick in global demand. Oil and gas stocks have doubled from their March 23 nadir, marking a sharp reversal from the precipitous drop that wiped out nearly two decades of gains.

Monday, June 15, 2020

Silver: How to Gauge the Crowd's Mindset / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2020

By: EWI

Watching out for sentiment extremes helps you avoid getting "caught up with the crowd"

Simply put, a market sentiment extreme is a situation when most everyone has already taken a bullish or bearish position in a financial asset, leaving almost no one left to buy or sell.

Silver provides an excellent case study.

Let's briefly go back to April 18, 2011, when Elliott Wave International's U.S. Short Term Update, which provides near-term forecasts for major U.S. financial markets thrice weekly, showed this chart and said:

Sunday, June 14, 2020

Gold and Silver Precious Metals Sector Correction Starts as Risk On and Seasonal Factors Weigh / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2020

By: The_Gold_Report

Technical analyst Clive Maund discusses the factors he sees weighing on precious metals in the near term.

The precious metals sector is now set up for a correction that could be quite severe, which is evident on the charts, but also made more likely by the fundamentals where we see a return to "risk on" as a result of ongoing massive money injection by the Fed coupled with this being a seasonally weak summer period for the metals ahead of their seasonally strongest time, which runs from late July through September. The return of "risk on" will be greatly encouraged by the stock market breaking out to new highs which will suck money out of the PM sector to be deployed in biotech, blockchain, the FAANGS and the better cannabis stocks, but it should return as the economy gets going again and all the newly created money starts to drive inflation sharply higher.

Starting with gold's 6-month chart we see that it is weakening following a failed upside breakout from a Symmetrical Triangle, and is it now close to breaking the first line of support shown. Once that fails it is likely to head down to the next support level near to its 200-day moving average.

Friday, June 12, 2020

US Dollar Cycle Points To New All-time Highs For Gold / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2020

By: Hubert_Moolman

The US Dollar index is not a true measure of value of the US dollar. It just tracks an “exchange rate” between the US dollar and a basket of significant fiat currencies.

For a true measure of value of the US dollar it is better to look to Gold and Silver. However, there is a relationship between significant Gold rallies and the US Dollar index.

Gold has a tendency to rally at a certain time in a US Dollar index long-term cycle. Previously, I have looked at significant Silver rallies, relative to the US Dollar long-term cycle. Here, I would like to look at Gold.

Friday, June 12, 2020

Will US Labor Market Recovery Sink Gold? / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2020

By: Arkadiusz_Sieron

The recent job report is not reliable, but it shows recovery in the US labor market. The situation is still bad, but optimism could triumph for now, which is bad for gold.  

On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Services released the newest edition of the Employment Situation Report. The publication shows that the US economy regained 2.5 million jobs in May, constituting the biggest nonfarm payroll surprise in history. Indeed, the economists polled by MarketWatch had forecast a loss of 7.25 million jobs. The rebound is presented in the chart below.

Friday, June 12, 2020

Bullion Bank Retreat Puts Floor Under Gold and Silver Prices / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2020

By: MoneyMetals

Investors dumped paper gold and silver along with stocks, commodities, and most other asset classes in March. The price of silver dropped to $12.02/oz on March 18th and gold bottomed at $1,473/oz.

The bullion banks – notorious for their concentrated short positions – might have made a killing. But that isn’t what happened. Some of the most prominent players took massive losses instead.

Friday, June 12, 2020

Silver Investing Strategy / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2020

By: Nadeem_Walayat

Firstly, my long standing approach to Silver has been one of buying (accumulating) when the Silver price is cheap to invest to capitalise on long-term Spikes, as the silver price tends to be quite erratic in behaviour, prone to a lot of false signals so Silver can be a difficult market to trade i.e. tends to run stops and sharp movements contrary to the likes of Gold, just as we experienced during Summer 2019, with the bulk of the silver moves taking place towards the end of precious metals bull runs as illustrated by my analysis of May 2018 investing for a $35+ Spike.

Thursday, June 11, 2020

Gold Silver Ratio / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2020

By: Nadeem_Walayat

I am afraid I have got some bad news for all the Silver bugs out there, for the gold / silver ratio chart makes it crystal clear that Silver is NOT a safe haven precious metal. Yes you may still call it a precious metal but it is NOT GOLD! That's for sure!

Thursday, June 11, 2020

Gold Sad Truth / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2020

By: Michael_Pento

The sad truth is that few people really know very much about gold, especially when it comes to investing in the metal. They don’t understand what makes it so valuable and unique, and they know even less what moves its price. Since I don’t want to spend an hour on why it is so precious, I’ll just try and sum it up in a sentence: Gold is extremely rare, beautiful, portable, transferable, divisible without losing value, and virtually indestructible. Very few things on this earth can meet all those criteria, and that is why it is the most perfect form of money humankind has ever found.

Now more than ever, investors desperately need to know what really influences the dollar price of gold. This is the case given the unprecedented falsification of asset prices and debt monetization taking place today. Gold is not driven by the fear of a crash in the major market averages. Nor is it even primarily concerned about the inverse correlation to the U.S. dollar (USD). Indeed, the massive interest rate suppression scheme by the Fed since the Great Recession has been the main reason behind the outperformance of gold compared with the S&P 500. This is true even in the context of a rising USD.

Thursday, June 11, 2020

Silver’s Apparent Recovery / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2020

By: Kelsey_Williams

Some might say “Silver’s performance over the past several weeks has been nothing short of phenomenal.” Others talk and act as if all of their wildly crazy price predictions have already come true.

The chart (source) below is a one-year history of daily prices for SLV (Silver ETF)…

Thursday, June 11, 2020

Unnatural Distortions and the Precious Metals / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2020

By: The_Gold_Report

The most recent U.S. jobs report, which he believes is bound for revision, has Michael Ballanger musing on how economic policies are reflected—or distorted—in the precious metals markets.

I was sitting in my den looking out over the swamp—er—lake tonight when it appeared as though something was flailing around near the shoreline. So I threw on my deck shoes and went for a stroll down to the water to see what all the commotion was about. Now, you must understand that I have been around the Kawartha Lakes since my late teens, having fished for pickerel alongside the Buckhorn Dam in the summer of 1970. Back in the day, the pickerel were so plentiful that we would throw two or three of these two- to three-pound beauties into the live well and then play "catch and release" for the remainder of the day, because you were taught at a very young age that you only take what you need as food and you release anything else so they could grow and make more baby pickerel. At the root of the practice was one remarkably simple fact: Pickerel are the finest-eating freshwater fish in the world and you want to protect them.

So here I am, looking past the weeds and algae in the shallows of western Lake Scugog and what comes lumbering past is the most gawd-ugly creature that I have ever observed—an enormous Asian carp that had to be ten pounds. Before I could say "invasive species," two more appeared, equally as detestable and even larger than the leviathan that first surfaced, after which the fish began to perform a kind of floundering, splashing, mating ritual where they rotated their bodies over and around the female in a manner most foreign to anything I have observed in six decades of angling in the Ontario waterways.

Tuesday, June 09, 2020

Silver vs Gold Trend / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2020

By: Nadeem_Walayat

The silver price has managed to recover from the Corona crash of 2020 with the price back within it's trading range of $17 to $20. Though contrary to the Silver bugs perma expectations for the Silver price to track the Gold price higher, that's not what usually tends to happen as the below graph illustrates,, which if you have followed my previous Silver analysis articles than you would know this is the expected behaviour of Silver, Gold's volatile and unresponsive to events cheaper cousin.

Monday, June 08, 2020

Gold Stocks Healthy Upleg / Commodities / Gold and Silver Stocks 2020

By: Zeal_LLC

The gold miners’ stocks just rolled over into a correction, raising concerns about the staying power of their massive post-panic upleg.  These higher prevailing gold prices have driven very-strong fundamentals at the gold miners.  But they are entering the seasonally-weak summer doldrums.  And current sentiment and technicals play major roles in governing when uplegs remain healthy or ready to give up their ghosts.

The GDX VanEck Vectors Gold Miners ETF remains the leading and dominant benchmark for this small contrarian sector.  Its $14.3b in net assets this week were a colossal 33.2x bigger than those of its next-largest 1x-long major-gold-miners-ETF competitor!  GDX’s only real rival is its little-brother GDXJ mid-tier gold-miners ETF, which is only about one-third of GDX’s size.  The GDX gold stocks have sure had a wild ride.

Normally the major gold miners of GDX leverage material gold moves by 2x to 3x.  Gold stocks’ excess gains during gold uplegs are necessary to compensate traders for miners’ big additional risks on top of gold-price fluctuations.  These include operational risks at individual mines, geopolitical risks in countries hosting gold mines, financial risks from hedging and currency fluctuations, along with many other risks.

Monday, June 08, 2020

Will Great Unlock Push Gold Prices Down? / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2020

By: Arkadiusz_Sieron

As Great Lockdown was positive for the gold prices, the Great Unlock will be bad, right? We invite you to read our today’s article about the Great Unlock and find out whether it really must be negative for the gold prices.

It’s all government’s fault, right? After all, the Great Lockdown was introduced by the federal and state governments introduced, wasn’t? Well, not quite.

Before I will explain why, let me clear one thing up: I’m a liberty lover and I’m skeptical about the government regulations. And the economic shutdown was obviously untenable – the only reason to shut down the economy was to buy some time to prepare the healthcare system for better handling of the epidemic. So, it’s good that the Great Lockdown is ending.