ゴールド上昇は奇妙だ by Zeal
先週の記事です。最後の2段落だけ訳をいれておきます。
Gold’s Peculiar Surge
Adam Hamilton February 21, 2020 3246 Words
While $1600+ gold
is certainly exciting, gold needs sizable sustained capital inflows
to keep powering higher in major uplegs. If that can’t come from
exhausted gold-futures traders, and isn’t coming from normal
gold-investment channels, gold’s staying power up here is
questionable. Asian gold investment demand on coronavirus fears is
likely what has forced gold higher, but it is unclear how long that
will persist.
ゴールドが$1600超というのは確かに興奮するが、大きな上昇を維持するにはかなりな資金の持続的な流入が必要だ。先物投機筋の資金が尽き果て、またいつものゴールド投資チャネルも尽き果てるなら、現在のゴールド高値維持は疑問だ。コロナウイルス恐怖によるアジアのゴールド投資がゴールドを持ち上げている可能性が高い、しかしこれがどれだけ持続するかは不透明だ。
Adam Hamilton, CPA February 21, 2020 Subscribe
Gold’s Peculiar Surge
Adam Hamilton February 21, 2020 3246 Words
Gold
is enjoying an awesome week, surging back above $1600 for the first
time in nearly 7 years! That big round psychologically-heavy level
is really catching traders’ attention, great improving sentiment.
Yet this recent gold surge has proven peculiar. Unlike normal
rallies, the buying driving this one largely hasn’t come from gold’s
usual primary drivers. The stealth buying behind this surge may
impair its staying power.
This
Tuesday gold surged 1.2% higher to close near $1602. It hadn’t
crested $1600 on close since way back in late March 2013 fully
6.9 years ago! Long-time gold traders shudder at the dark
spring which followed. Within less than several weeks after that
last $1600+ close, gold plummeted 16.2%. Most of that came in
mid-April, when gold effectively crashed by cratering a brutal 13.8%
in just 2 trading days!
By
late June just 3.0 months after that last $1600+ close, gold had
collapsed a catastrophic 25.3%! That horrific episode had no real
driver. Once gold breached $1550 tripping stop-loss orders, heavy
gold-futures and investment selling cascaded. That ended up looking
like a gold panic, and sentiment has yet to fully recover
from its devastating aftermath. So regaining $1600 is an incredibly
important event for this asset.
Gold
breaking out back above $1600 fueled more momentum buying, extending
its surge to $1611 on Wednesday. That left gold up 6.1%
year-to-date, an extraordinary move given the circumstances. The US
stock markets have also soared this year on the
Fed’s extreme QE4
Treasury monetizations, which have fueled epic euphoria and
complacency. The flagship US S&P 500 stock index was also up 4.8%
YTD.
As
the ultimate alternative investment which tends to rally when stocks
falter, gold is normally forgotten when stock markets power to
series of new record highs. The US dollar has also been really
strong so far in 2020 too, with its benchmark US Dollar Index
surging 3.2% YTD as of the middle of this week. Big dollar rallies
usually unleash sizable gold-futures selling, which pushes gold
lower in inverse proportion.
Seeing gold surge to major secular highs despite euphoric lofty
stock markets and such a strong dollar is peculiar and anomalous.
And the mystery deepens when considering recent months’ activity in
gold’s two dominant primary drivers, speculators’ gold-futures
trading and American stock investors’ capital flows. Neither have
seen anywhere near enough buying to explain gold’s impressive surge
in this young new year.
Seasoned traders including me don’t know what to make of this.
That’s evident in the odd indecisiveness of the major gold miners,
which have
largely stalled out instead of following gold higher. Back in
early September when this gold upleg originally peaked, the leading
GDX gold-stock ETF and gold crested at $30.95 and $1554. But even
with gold 3.7% higher at $1611 this week, GDX was still 3.9%
lower at $29.75!
This
strange disconnect of gold stocks grinding sideways to lower while
gold forges major new highs reveals lots of skepticism about
gold’s staying power. The hardened contrarian gold-stock traders
aren’t aggressively deploying capital like normal in gold uplegs.
Gold just doesn’t rally with record-high stock markets, a strong US
dollar, and minimal capital inflows from the usual gold-futures and
investment buying.
China’s terrifying coronavirus outbreak is likely the unique
stealth-gold-buying-boosting catalyst. Recently formally named
COVID-19 by the World Health Organization, that virus is the
scariest thing I’ve seen in my lifetime. China’s unprecedented
draconian quarantine measures affecting hundreds of millions of
its citizens and shutting down its economy reveal how exceedingly
dangerous that never-before-seen virus is.
I’ve
followed that outbreak in depth day-by-day in our newsletters, and
it is shocking. Indian and even Chinese researchers have written
expansive scientific papers arguing COVID-19 was almost certainly
biologically engineered in a lab in Wuhan before escaping.
Epidemiologists around the world believe that China’s government is
radically underreporting the infection and death counts, covering up
this catastrophe.
Brave Chinese people in the hot zone are using VPNs to post videos
to western social media to show what’s really going on. There’s
footage of people collapsing in the streets, hospitals overflowing,
piles of bodies, and clouds of weird smog in a shut-down city that
locals think is from mass incineration of bodies! COVID-19 is
incredibly virulent and deadly, even to relatively-healthy younger
people. That pathogen is dreadful.
This
plague that has real potential to snowball into the first global
pandemic in a century is certainly a great reason to buy gold!
It is a potential black-swan event, a fat-tail risk unlike anything
ever seen before. But novel-coronavirus-fueled gold buying should
show up in gold’s normal primary drivers. It has to some extent,
but at way-too-constrained levels to explain gold’s powerful surge
back over $1600 this year.
Most
short-term gold-price action is driven by speculators’ gold-futures
trading. These traders punch far above their weights relative to
their capital deployed because of the extreme leverage inherent in
that realm. As of this week, each gold-futures contract controlling
100 ounces of gold worth $160,000 at $1600 only requires traders
maintain cash margins in their accounts of $5000. That implies
32.0x max leverage!
Running at 10x, 20x, or 30x, every dollar of capital deployed in
gold futures has 10x, 20x, or 30x the price impact on gold as
a dollar invested outright. Speculators’ collective gold-futures
trading is published at a weekly resolution in the famous
Commitments of Traders reports. Unlike normal gold uplegs, gold’s
big breakout surge so far in 2020 isn’t explainable by what these
influential gold-futures traders have been doing.
Running extreme leverage means bearing extreme risks. At 30x, a
mere 3.3% gold move against specs’ bets would wipe out 100% of their
capital risked! There aren’t many traders brave or crazy enough to
live on that razor’s edge, so their collective gold-futures bets
are finite. Once these guys have bought all the gold futures
they can, their capital firepower to buy more is exhausted. That
caps gold’s upward momentum.
An
easy way to visualize this extensive data is in
gold-bull-trading-range terms. Speculators’ total longs and shorts,
upside and downside bets on gold, can be considered relative to
where they have been so far in gold’s secular bull which began in
mid-December 2015. The most-bullish-possible setup for gold is 0%
longs and 100% shorts, meaning specs have vast room to buy by adding
new longs and buying to cover shorts.
The
most-bearish-possible setup for gold is the opposite, specs
positioned at 100% longs and 0% shorts. That reveals their
capital firepower for buying is tapped out. They have bought all
the longs they are likely able to, and have covered all the shorts
they are likely to. That leaves gold at risk of big selling, as
gold-futures contracts are legally required to be unwound through
opposing trades that close those positions.
Early last September when this gold upleg originally peaked at $1554
and gold stocks were higher than today, total spec gold-futures
longs and shorts were running 96% and 8%. Their buying was pretty
much exhausted, leaving an ominous
gold-futures-selling overhang which I warned about at the time.
Indeed gold started to correct, slumping 6.4% over the next 2.7
months into late November. That was really mild.
This
gold bull’s prior couple corrections averaged much-larger 15.5%
selloffs over 6.0 months. Then oddly on Christmas Eve, a throwaway
half-day trading session, gold surged to a breakout above its
correction downtrend. That was before the US-Iran conflict flared
and went kinetic, and well before coronavirus was even mentioned in
the media. By New Year’s Eve, gold had powered 2.2% higher in just
5 trading days.
That
breakout rally was fully explainable by spec gold-futures
buying, which totaled 21.8k and 26.1k contracts in the couple of CoT
weeks ending that day. That had catapulted spec longs to a new
all-time-record high of 442.6k contracts, while spec shorts fell to
a gold-bull low of 76.1k. So entering 2020, spec gold-futures
positioning was literally running at that most-bearish-possible 100%
longs and 0% shorts!
These guys were out of buying firepower. And indeed over the 6
reported CoT weeks since New Year’s Eve, total spec longs haven’t
gone materially higher and spec shorts haven’t gone lower. Spec
longs have ranged between 100% to 89%, while spec shorts have been
running 0% to 7%. So the usual spec gold-futures buying that
explains normal gold uplegs has been far too small to fuel
2020’s big gold surge.
But
there’s a potential caveat on that. The weekly CoT reports
detailing specs’ gold-futures positioning are current to Tuesday
closes, but not published until late Friday afternoons. So the last
CoT report I’ve seen before this essay was published was current to
Tuesday February 11th when gold was trading at $1568. At that point
total spec longs and shorts were running 90% and 2% up into their
gold-bull trading ranges.
Over
the latest CoT week ending this Tuesday where gold soared 2.2% to
$1602, odds are that was driven by big gold-futures buying.
I suspect late today we’ll see total spec longs near or exceed early
January’s all-time-record high of 444.0k contracts. And spec shorts
will probably slump to new bull lows. But at least from $1517 gold
on New Year’s Eve to $1568 last week, spec gold-futures buying
didn’t explain it.
On
the contrary with total spec longs and shorts near that
most-bearish-possible for gold of 100% and 0% this year, gold faced
way-higher odds of a major selloff than a big surge higher. I’ve
looked, and haven’t found another example in modern history where
gold surged to major new highs without any apparent material spec
gold-futures buying. These guys dominate gold’s price action with
the huge leverage they wield.
That’s certainly peculiar, but gold has another primary driver of
investment demand. Unfortunately that’s a lot harder to measure
than gold-futures trading. The best data on global investment
demand comes from the World Gold Council, and it is only published
quarterly. The WGC’s latest Gold Demand Trends report covering
Q4’19 was released a few weeks ago, and it is essential reading for
everyone interested in gold.
While it is gold’s Q1’20 surge that is odd, the context provided by
hard Q4’19 world investment numbers is very relevant. While gold
slumped into that small correction mid-quarter, its subsequent
breakout at the end of December left it with decent 3.0% Q4 gains.
Gold investment looked relatively stable according to its leading
daily proxy, the gold-bullion holdings held by the dominant GLD
SPDR Gold Shares gold ETF.
They
only slumped 3.0% or 27.6 metric tons in Q4’19, which is pretty
mild. GLD’s holdings made it look like investors were holding their
ground as gold consolidated high, a sign of strength. But boy the
WGC’s quarterly numbers sure shattered that sanguine view. Overall
world gold investment demand actually plummeted a staggering 33.0%
year-over-year in Q4’19 according to the WGC! That is brutal,
seriously ugly.
The
WGC splits overall investment demand into two subcategories,
physical bars and coins and ETFs. The physical side dropped 15.7%
YoY to 240.6t, while the ETF side cratered as colossal 76.4% YoY to
just 26.8t! Even central banks, which are like gold investors but
have their own separate category entirely, saw gold buying falling
33.8% YoY to 109.6t. All that forced total world gold demand lower
last quarter.
It
dropped 19.3% YoY or 249.8t from Q4’18 levels. And the 131.6t
decline from investment and 56.0t from central banks accounted for
3/4ths of that overall drop! So global gold investment
demand leading into Q1’20 was exceptionally weak, there was no
momentum at all. That may have turned on a dime this quarter, but
we won’t know until the next WGC Gold Demand Trends report for Q1’20
due out by early May.
Again GLD’s holdings are the best daily proxy for global gold
investment demand. This American ETF is the primary conduit used by
American stock investors to move capital into and out of gold.
According to the WGC, GLD’s holdings alone at the end of Q4
accounted for about 31% of all the gold held by all the world’s gold
ETFs. Its next biggest competitor was only near 12%, GLD is the
juggernaut of gold ETFs.
This
next chart looks at GLD’s holdings superimposed on gold during this
secular gold bull. And they can’t explain gold’s stunning surge
back over $1600 this year either. In past quarters where gold has
made major moves higher, GLD dominated global gold demand. Case in
point is Q1’16 and Q2’16 when this gold bull’s maiden upleg was
underway. GLD’s holdings soared 27.5% and 16.0% higher those
quarters!
When
American stock investors buy GLD shares faster than gold is bought,
this ETF’s share price threatens to decouple from gold to the
upside. So GLD’s managers issue new shares to offset that
excess demand, and plow the capital raised into buying physical gold
bullion. In Q1’16 and Q2’16, the massive 176.9t and 130.8t
GLD-holdings builds alone accounted for 88% and 102% of total
global-gold-demand growth!
Back
in September when gold’s upleg initially peaked at $1554, GLD’s
holdings followed several weeks later at 924.9t. From there they
drifted lower on balance into mid-January, falling 5.5% to 874.5t
after Iran’s attack on US-used airbases in Iraq in response to the
US assassinating Iran’s top general. But gold still rallied 3.7%
over that span, not driven by investment buying but late-December’s
huge gold-futures buying.
Then
GLD’s holdings started growing again, showing American stock-market
capital flowing back into gold. By this Wednesday they had climbed
6.5% to 931.6t, a new upleg high. But that is still only 0.7% over
late-September’s initial-peak levels, despite gold powering 7.1%
higher over that 4.8-month span. Identifiable gold
investment demand per GLD’s holdings has been far too weak to
explain gold’s $1600+ surge.
In
normal gold uplegs, big-GLD-build days push gold proportionally
higher. Stock investors are buying GLD shares faster than gold
is being bought, forcing that ETF to issue new shares and use the
proceeds to buy gold bullion. In early September when this gold
upleg was initially peaking for example, back-to-back 1.3% and 0.7%
GLD-holdings-build days helped drive proportional 1.4% and 0.6%
daily gold rallies.
Incidentally around that same 0.7% is where a daily GLD-holdings
build becomes sizable. So far since GLD’s mid-January holdings low,
there have been 3 sizable GLD-build days. They were a massive 2.2%
on January 17th, 1.0% on February 4th, and 0.7% on February 11th.
Those 3 days alone saw 34.8t of GLD builds, or over 6/10ths
of its total recent build. But they too proved peculiar like much
of this gold surge.
On
those 3 big-GLD-build days where its holdings surged 2.2%, 1.0%, and
0.7%, gold’s price first merely climbed 0.2%, second plunged 1.5%,
and third slipped 0.3%. When big-GLD-build days don’t see gold
enjoy proportional rallies like usual, they don’t signal big
investment buying. Big gold underperformance on such days
means American stock investors weren’t selling GLD shares as fast as
gold was being sold.
When
specs dump gold futures faster than GLD shares are being sold, the
latter’s price threatens to decouple to the upside by not falling as
fast as gold. GLD’s managers have to step in and equalize that
supply differential to maintain tracking. So they issue enough new
GLD shares to push its price down in proportion with gold, and use
the money raised to buy more gold bullion. Such days aren’t a
bullish omen.
This
GLD-holdings chart shows that all this gold bull’s past uplegs
including the current one to its original early-September peak were
driven by big sustained differential GLD-share buying. Gold needs
to see big investment-capital inflows to fuel major uplegs. Yet
gold’s surge so far this year has happened without those inflows
being substantial according to GLD’s holdings. That adds to the
peculiarity of gold’s breakout surge.
Experienced traders are hesitant to get excited here because gold’s
recent move higher doesn’t tick any of the usual major-upleg boxes.
Gold-futures specs haven’t been materially buying, at least before
this latest CoT week current to this Tuesday. And investors haven’t
been materially buying either, at least per GLD’s holdings. Its
recent build is small, and the lion’s share came on a few days when
gold was very weak.
So
what the heck is going on here? My best guess after decades of
intensely studying and actively trading gold and its miners’ stocks
is Asian investment buying has exploded on that COVID-19
plague. That isn’t readily quantifiable, but is sometimes evident
when most of gold’s daily gains happen overnight in the US when
Asian markets are open. Some of gold’s recent sizable daily rallies
indeed came during those hours.
In
those cases, the subsequent US-market action merely held on to those
Asian gains. But adding to the mystery of all this, there have also
been plenty of trading days this year where gold was flat overnight
in Asian trading but then got bid higher when the US was open.
Watching 24-hour gold price charts daily is essential in trying to
determine where gold buying is coming from, which can really affect
its sustainability.
With
COVID-19 rapidly spreading in Asia, those investors really should be
buying gold. If the infection rate is as high as anecdotal reports
and that whole cruise-ship-quarantined-in-Japan episode suggest,
this virus is going to explode no matter how governments try to
suppress it. But historical Asian gold-demand data is so sparse and
fragmented I don’t know how to game whether that buying is likely
sustainable.
Can
this stealth demand keep gold rallying while gold-futures
speculators can’t buy and are likely to sell hard to normalize their
excessively-bullish bets? Can it prevent gold from correcting when
investment demand looks anemic at best according to its leading
daily proxy GLD’s holdings? Only time will tell, but the major
peculiarities of this year’s gold surge mean caution remains in
order. This isn’t a normal gold upleg!
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The bottom line is
gold’s surge this year has been very peculiar. It mostly hasn’t
been driven by gold’s usual dominant primary drivers of gold-futures
buying and investment capital inflows. The gold-futures specs have
been largely fully deployed continuously, their buying firepower
tapped out. And investors haven’t been materially buying either per
their leading daily proxy. GLD’s holdings only rose modestly.
要約すると、今年のゴールド急騰はとても奇妙なものだ。通常はゴールド価格変化の主要因である先物や投資家の資金流入によるものではなかった。先物投機筋はすでに全力展開を継続しており、買い余力は尽きている。またGLDを見る限りは投資家もそれほど買い進んでいない。GLD保持高の増加は穏やかなものだ。
要約すると、今年のゴールド急騰はとても奇妙なものだ。通常はゴールド価格変化の主要因である先物や投資家の資金流入によるものではなかった。先物投機筋はすでに全力展開を継続しており、買い余力は尽きている。またGLDを見る限りは投資家もそれほど買い進んでいない。GLD保持高の増加は穏やかなものだ。
ゴールドが$1600超というのは確かに興奮するが、大きな上昇を維持するにはかなりな資金の持続的な流入が必要だ。先物投機筋の資金が尽き果て、またいつものゴールド投資チャネルも尽き果てるなら、現在のゴールド高値維持は疑問だ。コロナウイルス恐怖によるアジアのゴールド投資がゴールドを持ち上げている可能性が高い、しかしこれがどれだけ持続するかは不透明だ。
Adam Hamilton, CPA February 21, 2020 Subscribe