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’s Back in a Bull Market but perhaps overbought

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

Last week I returned from sunny Florida, where I had been attending the BMO Metals and Mining Conference, widely regarded as the best in the business. Sentiment toward gold was very optimistic, as I told Kitco News’ Daniela Cambone in last week’s edition of Gold Game Film. As always, Daniela did a fabulous job covering the event, interviewing all of the CEOs and other mining executives.

Frank Holmes: This Rally Has Room to Grow - Kitco News - 25th Global Metals & Mining Conference

The yellow metal is 2016’s best-performing asset class so far, having climbed more than 19 percent. It just had its strongest February since 1975.

What’s more, gold appears as though it’s back in a bull market, often defined as a 20 percent gain from a recent trough. Short-term, though, it’s way overbought, so a correction at this point would be healthy.

Follow the Money, Follow the Gold Flows

At the BMO Conference, I had the pleasure of meeting and speaking with my friend Pierre Lassonde,cofounder of Franco-Nevada, and company CEO David Harquail. Pierre told me that for every $1 billion that flows into the SPDR Gold Trust (GLD), the price of gold rises approximately $30 per ounce. Since the beginning of the year, we’ve seen about $9.3 billion flow into the GLD. During the same period, gold has risen 20 percent from its six-year low of $1,049.60 per ounce on December 17 to end Friday trading at $1,259.25.

The first breakout signal occurred on December 31, 2015, when money started to flow into gold, and the second important signal was when gold flows surpassed the 200-day, or 10-month, average, on February 1, 2016. Since the beginning of the year, gold has surged.

Outstanding Shares in the SPDR Gold Trust
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Like bullion, gold miners had a particularly gainful February, its best since 1998. The NYSE Arca Gold Miners Index rose an impressive 38.7 percent, compared to the 0.4 percent the S&P 500 Index lost in February. Year-to-date, production leaders Goldcorp, Newmont Mining and Barrick—which has recently lowered its debt-to-equity ratio—are thriving with prices pushing higher.

Gold Rush for Miners
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Gold is surging right now for a number of reasons, many of which I’ve covered in the last few weeks, including stronger inflation, negative interest rates and other components of the Fear Trade.

Global growth concerns have also spooked many investors, driving them into gold’s arms. Last week we learned that the global PMI fell pretty dramatically to a neutral 50.0 reading in February, down from 50.9 in January. Anything below 50.0 indicates manufacturing deterioration, and while I hope we don’t cross into that territory, the PMI has been trending downward over the last two years. We haven’t seen sub-50 readings since 2012.

Manufacturing Activity Stumbles in February
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As I’ve discussed many times before, we use PMIs to help forecast global manufacturing conditions three to six months out. (I’ve likened the economic indicator to the high beams on your car, with GDP serving as your rearview mirror.) That the PMI remains below its three-month moving average doesn’t bode well for commodities or energy in the short-term. The weakness underscores the need for global economies to reform their tax systems and relax regulations, as China is attempting to do.