Fasten your seatbelt for silver and gold

By Stefan Gleason, President Money Metals Exchange

The gold bull is back. After trending downward for more than four years, gold prices have broken out to the upside with a gain of more than 20% off their December lows.

Gold’s crossing of the 20% threshold even caused the financial media to take notice. “Gold is now in a bull market,” reported CNNMoney (March 7, 2016).

Is the path now clear for gold prices to march on toward new all-time highs? Perhaps.

But gold bulls can be temperamental and unpredictable. Sometimes they disappoint, as was the case with multiple short-lived bull markets in the 1980s and 1990s. Sometimes they keep running and running until they go parabolic.

So far all we’ve seen is a gold rally turn into an “official” bull market by virtue of prices advancing 20%. It’s an encouraging sign of strength; but it’s not in itself confirmation of a larger trend in force. A major bull market is characterized by a series of higher highs and higher lows over a period of months to years.

So far, gold has rallied around 22% from a low over a period of a few weeks. This rate of ascent isn’t sustainable in perpetuity. A healthy bull market ebbs and flows – it takes two steps forward and one step back, as It were.

That’s why a price correction after a 20%+ advance would be normal and healthy. If it’s a major bull market, then prices will go on to make a higher high, followed by a higher low.

Recall that the last big mania in gold took place from mid 1976 to January 1980. Prices surged more than 700% over that time period. Yet there were still corrections along the way – until the final, parabolic blow-off move. Another major gold bull market didn’t return until 2001-2011.

Yet from 1980 to 2001, there were multiple rallies of greater than 20%. For example, from April to September 1980, gold prices rallied more than 40%. But from there, they turned around to make lower lows.

In the summer of 1982, gold prices spiked 65% – from $300 to $500 an ounce. But by 1985 prices had fallen back below $300. The gold market hit rock bottom in 1999 at just above $250. Prices rallied 30% in the second half of 1999 before sliding back down to test those ultimate lows one last time in 2001.

The point is that when it comes to precious metals markets, an official bull market designation doesn’t necessarily mean the larger bear market is over. Investors must consider other technical and fundamental evidence that a major bull market is in force.

Major bull markets typically begin when pessimism reaches an extreme. That seems to have occurred last December when the Federal Reserve moved to raise interest rates. At the time, the Wall Street Journalreported that “a shift to higher rates is expected to hurt gold.” Meanwhile, an enormous speculative short (bearish) position had built up on gold and silver in the futures markets.

Everyone was looking for precious metals to keep falling heading into 2016. The January 4, 2016 issue of Barron’s contained an article titled “Gold Likely to Stay Tarnished.” It quoted an analyst prediction of $800/oz gold and concluded, “Beaten-down gold is unlikely to tempt many investors in 2016.”

Oh, really?

The financial establishment’s bearish consensus on gold has thus far proven to be dead wrong. Demand for the yellow metal is surging in 2016 along with the spot price. Assets in gold price-tracking exchange-traded funds have swelled so rapidly that one such instrument – the iShares Gold Trust (IAU) – took the unprecedented step of suspending the creation of new shares. The fund’s managers said they were overwhelmed by $1.4 billion in new inflows since the start of the year.

Investors in gold ETFs are left to wonder not only whether their shares are being fully backed by physical gold at all times; but also whether a fund manager might decide to suspend redemptions in the event of a selling surge of similar magnitude as the recent buying surge.

Investors in gold and silver coins are left to wonder whether dealers may run out of inventory of popular products such as American Eagles. The U.S. Mint in recent months has been hit with record demand forSilver Eagles. At current rates of buying, the Mint alone will require more tonnes of silver this year than is mined in the U.S.! And that does not even count the substantial amount of silver rounds and bars that private mints manufacture.

This fact leads us to what ultimately must underpin a major bull market in precious metals: favorable fundamentals of supply and demand. Gold and silver markets can rise or fall by 20% over any given period based purely on technical factors. But if the precious metals are going to launch into a multi-year bull market that takes prices to new record highs, it will be because of strong physical demand coupled withtightness in supply.

Negative real interest rates are great for gold prices.

The wild card going forward is the monetary backdrop. Never before have central bankers pursued negative interest rate policies en masse. From Europe to Japan and beyond, some $6 trillion in global assets are stuck in negative-yielding bonds. The U.S. could be the next big country to go negative.

Negative interest rates might make physical precious metals (which obviously don’t pay interest) more attractive than ever before as financial assets. But historically what has mattered and what will likely continue to matter most for precious metals is not whether nominal interest rates are falling or rising. It’s what’s happening with real (after inflation) rates on bonds and cash. The more people fear losing to inflation by holding bonds and cash, the more they will seek gold and silver for protection.

So far in 2016, silver hasn’t performed as impressively as gold. Silver’s continued underperformance is one of the few remaining negatives on which precious metals naysayers can hang their hats. In a major bull market for precious metals, silver should outperform. Gold is analogous to a blue-chip stock in the Dow Jones Industrials. Silver is akin to a small-cap technology stock – more thinly traded, more volatile, more potential for explosive gains.

Silver lagged behind gold in the early stages of the bull market that began in 2001. But silver put the exclamation mark on the sector top that occurred in 2011 with a dramatic spike to nearly $50/oz. The next great precious metals bull market could give us a triple-digit price handle on silver and a doubling (or more) of gold’s former all-time high.

Fasten your seatbelt!

Gold cruising so far this year. Best 2016 asset class ytd

By Frank Holmes – CEO and Chief Investment Officer, U.S. Global Investors 

This is an exciting time for gold. After another annual loss in 2015, its fourth year in a row, the precious metal has plotted a new course, one that has ferried it to the lead position among all other major asset classes in 2016.

Gold the Best-Performing Asset of 2016
click to enlarge

I already shared with you that on Friday, gold signaled a “golden cross,” a bullish indicator that occurs when the 50-day moving average crosses above the 200-day moving average. As of February 29, just a day after gold Oscar statuettes were handed out in Hollywood, gold bullion has gained close to a phenomenal 17 percent year-to-date.

What’s more, this past month was its most impressive February performance since futures trading data began in 1975.

Gold Leaps to Its Best-Ever February Performance
click to enlarge

Many analysts now believe we’ve seen the final days of the gold bear market, which began after the metal touched its all-time high of $1,900 per ounce in 2011, with one analyst saying that “buying gold today may be comparable to buying stocks in April 2009.” (Between then and November 2015, the S&P 500 Index rose 145 percent.)

The metal’s surge is largely reflective of investors’ lack of faith in G20 central bankers and finance ministers’ ability to jumpstart global growth. The meeting held this past weekend in Shanghai was considered a major disappointment, with no clear resolution reached on how to address slow growth. But this is to be expected. As I’ve said before, G20 bankers seem more interested today in synchronizing global taxation and regulation than in balancing monetary and fiscal policies.

Ironically, though, one of the latest monetary tools—negative interest rates—has been a boon to gold prices. As rates have dropped below zero in Japan, Sweden, Switzerland and elsewhere, and with speculation they could be introduced here in the U.S., many investors have moved into, or increased their exposure to, gold. The metal has historically served as a dependable store of value.

Another driver of prices is the weak economic data that was released this Tuesday. China’s purchasing manager’s index (PMI) contracted even further in February, falling from 49.4 to 49.0. Meanwhile, the global PMI had a dramatic pullback, dropping to a neutral 50.0, which is its lowest possible reading before manufacturing begins to stagnate. We haven’t seen this level since 2012.

I’ll get into more detail on gold and PMIs in this Friday’s Investor Alert, which I encourage you tosubscribe to if you haven’t already. Until then, best wishes!

“Wrestling with Something Else”: Why this Gold Bear Market Is Different

By Frank Holmes*

Earlier this week, I had the pleasure to appear on Jim Puplava’s Financial Sense Newshour radio program and discuss the state of the gold market. Along with my peers John Doody of the Gold Stock Analyst and Ross Hansen of Northwest Territorial Mint, I shared my thoughts on how we arrived in the current bear market, what factors might help us get out of it and the role real interest rates play in prices.

Below I’ve highlighted a few of my responses to Jim’s questions.

Q: Let’s begin with the bear market that began in 2011. Two questions I’d like you to answer. Number one: What do you believe caused it? Number two: Do you think this is cyclical or a secular bear market?

A: As I often say, two factors drive gold: the Love Trade and the Fear Trade.

In 1997 and 1998, the bottom of the emerging market meltdown took place. Four years later, we saw China and Asia starting to take off and GDP per capita rise. This is an important factor in this whole run-up that I would characterize as the Love Trade. A strong correlation is rising GDP per capita, and in China, India and the Middle East, they buy gold and many gifts of love.

We saw the Fear Trade starting to take place after 9/11. The biggest factor behind the Fear Trade is negative real interest rates. So when you had both—negative real interest rates and rising GDP per capita in the emerging countries—you had gold demand going to record numbers.

At the very peak of 2011, the dollar had just been basically downgraded by Moody’s and we had negative interest rates on a 10-year government bond. It was a record negative real rate of return, like in the ‘70s. You saw this spending from the Fear Trade, but this Love Trade was in negative real interest rates.

Negative Real Interest Rates Have Had a Positive Impact on Gold
click to enlarge

Since then, the U.S. has gone positive. But we’re seeing that in Europe, gold is taking off in euro terms, and in Japan it’s taking off in yen terms. They’re running at negative real interest rates the way we were on a relative basis up to 2011.

Gold Returns in Euros and Japanese Yen vs. U.S. Dollars
click to enlarge

Q: So would you define this bear market as a cyclical bear market, a correction in a long-term trend, or would you define it as secular very much in the way that we experienced the price of gold between, let’s say, the 1980s and 1990s?

A: I think that we’re wrestling with something else. When we look at the other basic metals, what drives the demand for iron, copper, anything that makes steel? It’s fiscal policies. Huge infrastructure spending and fiscal policies. What’s happened since 2011—and after the crash of 2008 but particularly in 2011—is that when the G20 central bankers get together, they don’t talk about trade. It’s all about tax and regulation. They have to keep interest rates low to try to compete, to try to get exports up, to drive their economies. That is a big difference on the need for all these commodities, and it seems to have ended the bull market. Until we get global fiscal policies up and increase infrastructure building, then I have to turn around and look the other way, and say it’s going to take a while.

I do think that gold is going through a bear market. A lot of it has to do more with the central bankers and everything they try to do to discredit gold as an asset class, at the same time try to keep interest rates low to keep economic activity going strong. That’s been a much different factor in driving the price of gold.

The other thing that’s been fascinating is this shift of gold from North America to Switzerland to China. The Chinese have a strategy for the renminbi. Not only do they have 200 million people buying gold on a monthly program throughout their banking system, but the government is buying gold because it needs to back the renminbi to make it a world-class currency of trade.

The Great Tectonic Shift of Physical Gold From West to East

Q: Explain two things: one, why we never saw the hyper-inflation that people thought we were going to see with the massive amounts of quantitative easing (QE), and two, investor preferences changing from hard assets into stocks.

A: Well first of all, a lot of money didn’t really go directly into the economy. We never had a huge spike in credit supply in 2011, ’12, ’13. Only in ’14 did we start to see it really pick up.

U.S. Bank Loan Growth is Nearing Pre-Recession High
click to enlarge

We never got this big inflation some expected because the money is so difficult, outside of getting a car loan or an extension on a house. Even Ben Bernanke, after he left the Federal Reserve, had trouble refinancing his house following his own procedures. It’s extremely onerous to get a loan.

I think the biggest part is to follow the money. And where is the money going? It’s showing up in stocks. When I look at gold stocks, it’s amazing to see that the indexes are down since 2011, but a basket of the royalty companies is positive. So why is money finding its way to them? What are the factors driving that? Well, not only do they have free cash flow, but they also have a higher profit margin and they’ve been raising their dividends. Franco-Nevada again just raised its dividend. Since 2011, the dividend yield on Franco-Nevada and Royal Gold has been higher than a 5-year government bond and many times higher than a 10-year government bond. So money all of a sudden starts going for that yield and growth.

Q: What’s happened to the industry since the downturn began in 2011?

A: Well, when you take a look at the big run we had until 2006, we had very strong cash flow returns on invested capital. We had expanding free cash flow. And then a lot of the mining companies lost their focus on growth on a per-share basis. They kept doing these acquisitions, which made a company go from “$1 billion to $2 billion in revenue.” However, the cost of that meant that there was less gold per share in production and there were less reserves per share. You had this run-up in the cost for equipment, for exploration, for development. The result was you had seven majors lose their CEOs. And in the junior to mid-cap size, you probably had another 20 in which management was thrown out.

The new management is much more focused on capital returns. They have to be. Otherwise they get criticized. That will hold a lot of these managements accountable, and I think that’s very healthy. And now it’s starting to show up that the returns on capital are improving for several of these companies.

Today, gold mining company management is much focused on capital returns.

Q: What would you be doing with money right now if you were to be in the gold market? How much would you put in the gold market? How would you have that money invested.

A: I’ve always advocated 10 percent and rebalance every year. Five percent would go into gold bullion, coins, gold jewelry—you travel around the world and you can buy gorgeous gold jewelry at basically no mark-up compared to the mark-up on Fifth Avenue. The other 5 percent is in gold stocks, and if it’s a basket of these royalty companies, I think you’ll do well over time, and you rebalance.

If not, then you go to an active manager, like we have. Speaking from a buyer’s position, Ralph Aldis— portfolio manager of our Gold and Precious Metals Fund (USERX) and World Precious Minerals Fund (UNWPX)—is a TopGun ranked in Canada as an active manager.

Q: Explain your caution in terms of gold in the percentage you recommend.

A: I’ve always looked at gold as being a hedge from the imbalance of government policies. Having that 10-percent weighting and rebalancing every year might help protect your overall portfolio. There are many studies going back 30 years that show that rebalancing helps.

It’s also advisable to put half your money in dividend-paying blue chip stocks that are increasing their revenue. When there are great years in the stock market, people often take some profits. And when gold’s down, as it is now, it might be time to put money in gold and gold equities.

For more, listen to the entire interview.

*Frank Holmes is CEO and Chief Investment Officer for U.S. Global Investors – www.usfunds.com