Mining’s old guard needs strong medicine
A new report details subpar investor returns in the mining industry over the last decade, particularly big cap diversified companies which have not adapted to new realities.
With the Martin Luther King holiday in the U.S. yesterday…there wasn’t much price excitement in gold…and the Comex closed early at 1:15 p.m. Eastern.
Gold rose a few bucks in early Far East trading, but soon rolled over and headed lower…with Monday’s low price coming at the London a.m. gold fix at 10:30 a.m. GMT. After that, it gained a couple of bucks…and closed basically unchanged from Friday. Volume was non-existent.
Of course, the silver price was more ‘volatile’…and the bullion banks took the opportunity of setting a new low price for this move down…which flushed out more technical longs. The low of the day [a hair below $28.00 spot] came at the same time as gold’s…the London a.m. gold fix at 5:30 a.m. Eastern time. The silver price recovered from that point somewhat…but came nowhere near finishing in positive territory like the gold price did. There wasn’t big volume but, compared to gold’s volume, it was immense.
From the Far East open…right up until it’s high of the day at 4:30 a.m. Eastern time…the world’s reserve currency tacked on about 50 basis points. Then, in less than three hours from that high, the dollar gave back virtually all of those gains. Then it jumped 30 points from it’s 7:20 a.m. Eastern time low…and from that point traded sideways for what was left of the New York session.
Judging from the graph below, I’d say that the dollar’s machinations made little difference in the price of the precious metals yesterday.
With no trading in the equity markets in New York yesterday, there was no HUI. However, the TSX Gold index in Toronto was up a small fraction…and most of the silver shares were down on the day.
There was a CME Delivery Report yesterday…but it was exactly [to the contract] the same numbers that I reported in my column on Saturday morning. Obviously an error in their system somewhere…and I’m not going to add to it by repeating what I said on Saturday.
Because of the holiday, there were no reports from either ETF, the U.S. Mint, or the Comex-approved depositories.
But it wasn’t a holiday in Europe…and the good folks over at Zürcher Kantonalbank in Switzerland reported that their gold ETF added 13,853 ounces last week…while their silver ETF reported a decline of 273,507 troy ounces during the week that was. As always, I thank Carl Loeb for those numbers.
