Gold News

Gold Price vs. Pundits: Can't Both Be Wrong

Gold prices up, yet media and market sentiment down like a hangover...
 
THIS is more like it. Something like capitulation in gold at last, writes Adrian Ash at BullionVault. And even as gold prices rise, too.
 
How come?
 
The noise is all about Iraq, with medieval fanatics turning the desert sands red. Or blame gold's rally on Ukraine if you like. Fresh violence near Russia's borders must be good for the ghouls who buy gold, right?
 
Yet crude oil prices are little changed beneath this month's highs. So even the latest chatter about the return of inflation – announced by analysts at J.P.Morgan, and dismissed by the Fed – seems to be wide of the mark. 
 
So instead, we suggest...and with only half a smirk...that gold's recent rise is because the consensus is finally pointing the other way. That is most clearly flagged, we think, by a detailed, thoughtful article from Bloomberg.
 
In the face of gold's strongest Jan-June gains since 2010...up 9.4% with the kind of rise that saw analysts and pundits urging fresh gains to come back then...gold investors are now "heartbroken", it says. So hurt, in fact, they won't ever get back together again with the metal.
 
Gold ETF holdings this month got back to new 2009 lows. US gold coin sales have dropped 60% so far in 2014 from the same period last year. Analysts are bearish everywhere except the amateur internet.
 
Google searches to "buy gold", we'd add, have also dropped off a cliff. And with stock markets knocking on or above all-time highs, who can blame Western investors – or households around the world in fact – for getting over gold at last?
 
Sure not money-manager and columnist Barry Ritholtz. You can "kiss the gold bull market goodbye" according to him and his sub-editors. Because "all of the factors that led to the huge rally in gold from 2001-2011 are no longer present," apparently. Factors such as fear of inflation (not here, never will be) or a stockmarket crash (remember those? Thought not) just don't apply anymore.
 
Hence the "golden years are gone" says Motley Fool UK, going on to call gold " a store of risk, not wealth." It gives the sad example of an elderly couple who sold their home, put £100,000 of the cash into gold ($150,000 at the time), and are now down 20%. At current prices, that suggests they bought either spring 2013 or midsummer 2011. So hindsight says they should have bought shares (if you're interested, down 20% from 3 years before 8.2% of the time since 1975) or just stuck with housing (likewise according to the Nationwide's inflation-adjusted HPI). Stocks and bricks are plainly better than gold (down 20% or worse from 3 years before 7.0% of the time since 1968), because – according to the Fool – gold "is the riskiest investment".
 
Got over gold yet? There's more. Because it isn't even an investment says Kiplingers. No, it's merely a commodity, and so " I loathe gold," says columnist James Glassman. Sure, gold goes up sometimes (times like every year from 2001 to 2012 for instance). "But over the long term, I'd rather have my money in stocks, which put the brilliance and the imagination of the human mind on my side..." (and which tend to fall when gold rises, pitting that ingenuity against a lump of metal that does so little, it doesn't even rust).
 
So we're really motoring now, getting anti-gold sentiment from the very people a contrarian would want. Because louder than his Bush-Cheney cheerleading, and louder even than his consistent anti-commodities jibes, Glassman is most famous for co-writing Dow 36,000 – "perhaps the most spectacularly wrong investing book ever" (copyright, the Washington Post) – just as the Tech Stock bubble was about to become the everything crash at the turn of the century. That 1999 pratfall was so unfunny for equity bulls, anyone reading Glassman's gold loathing today might feel 15 years younger and start planning a Y2K party. Only this time, you'll know trouble lies ahead.
 
Away from the talking heads and columnists, bank analysts have also been bearish on gold right down to their socks as well. Technical analysts, noting the upturn in gold's short-term picture, can't get past advising clients to fade rallies and look for lower prices ahead. Fundamental analysts weighing supply against demand point either to the return of ETF selling by Western funds, or the missing millions of Chinese buyers who've now taken net imports to the world's No.1 consumer nation more than 20% lower for three months running.
 
Thing is, those commentators dismissing gold as "speculative" and driven solely by emotion are right. The above-ground stockpile of gold is so large – equal to 40 years of global demand – that mining or buying one more ounce changes little. Prices rise when buyers pay more, and sellers ask higher. Gold falls when jewelry consumers become the marginal buyer, and existing owners accept whatever they can.
 
What flicks that switch is sentiment, whether towards gold or away from other, more typically "productive" assets. Behind that sentiment may sit many different financial or economic back-drops, chief among them the direction of real interest rates. But since gold's utility is always and only social – whether for adornment, monetary exchange, or trying to defend or grow spending power – then human emotions really do drive. And right now, the major-league pundits feel more down on gold than any time I can think of in the last decade.
 
Columns advising against gold have reached a crescendo this month, far louder even than when prices bottomed a year ago, in June 2013. Capitulation on gold was lacking at last year's 3-year lows. Might this be it for sentiment, a near-universal rejection?

Adrian Ash

Adrian Ash, BullionVault Gold News

Adrian Ash is director of research at BullionVault, the world-leading physical gold, silver and platinum market for private investors online. Formerly head of editorial at London's top publisher of private-investment advice, he was City correspondent for The Daily Reckoning from 2003 to 2008, and he has now been researching and writing daily analysis of precious metals and the wider financial markets for over 20 years. A frequent guest on BBC radio and television, Adrian is regularly quoted by the Financial Times, MarketWatch and many other respected news outlets, and his views from inside the bullion market have been sought by the Economist magazine, CNBC, Bloomberg, Germany's Handelsblatt and FAZ, plus Italy's Il Sole 24 Ore.

See the full archive of Adrian Ash articles on GoldNews.

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