Chart Update
The Seeds of the Next Bust Are Closer to Sprouting
The price of gold was up this week, by $10 and that of silver by ¢6. Something is brewing in the fundamentals that we haven’t seen since… last year. We will show a picture of this, below.
There are many problems with assuming a rising stock market means a growing economy. We’ve written many times about the much-greater growth of debt, i.e., borrowing to consume, which adds to GDP.
S&P 500 Index, monthly – the huge rally since 2009 was accompanied by the weakest economic recovery of the post-WW2 era. Evidently, the stock market does not necessarily reflect economic growth. Very often numerous other factors prove to be far more important drivers of stock prices. A pertinent example is Venezuela’s soaring stock market, which is up by 88,500% in the past year alone (this is not a typo). Meanwhile, the country’s economy is contracting since 2014, with the slump accelerating to a stunning -16.5% y/y in both 2017 and 2018. The S&P 500 Index is an island of sanity by comparison, at least superficially (the ceteris are of course not paribus). [PT]
Coffee, Milk and Gold
Last week was holiday-shorted due to Good Friday (it’s not an official holiday in the US, but it is in the UK. And this week’s report is a day late due to Easter Monday). The price of gold dropped $15, but the price of silver rose ¢4. Perhaps silver traders got word that we are paying interest on silver, which gives people a reason to hold silver? J
A silver bar plus interest… [PT]
Learning From Other People’s Mistakes is Cheaper
One benefit of hindsight is that it imparts a cheap superiority over the past blunders of others. We certainly make more mistakes than we’d care to admit. Why not look down our nose and acquire some lessons learned from the mistakes of others?
Bitcoin, weekly. The late 2017 peak is completely obvious in hindsight… [PT]
Investors are Oblivious to the Market’s Downside Potential
This is a brief update on a number of sentiment/positioning indicators we have frequently discussed in these pages in the past. In this missive our focus is exclusively on indicators that are of medium to long-term relevance to prospective stock market returns. Such indicators are not really useful for the purpose of market timing – instead they are telling us something about the likely duration and severity of the bust that will follow on the heels of the current market mania. The first chart is an update of the current situation in RYDEX funds. Despite their small size, these funds have always represented a quite accurate microcosm of general market sentiment.
A RYDEX overview: RYDEX money market fund assets have recently declined to new all time lows; the pure non-leveraged bull-bear fund ratio is back above 29 (i.e., bull funds assets are more then 29 times larger than bear fund assets). At the top of the tech mania in early March 2000, this ratio peaked at roughly 17. Lastly, the amount of assets in RYDEX bear funds demonstrates that bears remain extremely discouraged. It is fair to say that at this stage almost no-one expects that the market could suffer a serious slump.
Is Silver Hard of Hearing?
The price of gold inched down, but the price of silver footed down (if we may be permitted a little humor that may not make sense to metric system people). For the gold-silver ratio to be this high, it means one of two things. It could be that speculators are avoiding the monetary metals and metal stackers are depressed. Or that something is going on in the economy, to drive demand for the metals in different directions.
As a rule the gold silver ratio acts as a proxy for credit spreads – this is attributable to the fact that silver prices are partly driven by the metal’s large industrial demand component (by contrast, the vast bulk of gold demand consists of monetary or investment demand; industrial and fabrication demand in the gold market are negligible by comparison). In the chart above we compare the gold-silver ratio to the IEF-JNK ratio, which serves as a proxy for corporate credit spreads (note: “unadjusted” means that only prices are compared, not total returns – interest payments received by holders of IEF and JNK are not included). An interesting divergence has emerged since the 2014-2016 oil patch mini-bust – while the gold-silver ratio is streaking to new highs, the IEF-JNK ratio has established a lower high in late 2018. We believe this is mainly due to the massive distortion of credit markets in the wake of the QE and ZIRP/NIRP policies pursued by the world’s largest central banks. One of these markets is wrong and it is a good bet that the market that has been manipulated by central bank interventions is the one that is giving a false signal. [PT]
Boom Times Compared
It has become abundantly clear by now that the late 2018 swoon was not yet the beginning of the end of the stock market bubble – at least not right away. While money supply growth continues to decelerate, the technical underpinnings of the rally from the late December low were actually quite strong – in particular, new highs in the cumulative NYSE A/D line indicate that it was broad-based.
Cumulative NYSE A/D line vs. SPX – normally the A/D line tends to deteriorate before the market peaks, as the advance narrows and fewer and fewer stocks participate in the rally. This did in fact happen shortly before the early October top.
A Worrisome Trend
If you read gold analysis much, you will come across two ideas. One, inflation so-called (rising consumer prices) is not only running much higher than the official statistic, but is about to really start skyrocketing. Two, buy gold because gold will hedge it. That is, the price of gold will go up as fast, or faster, than the price of gold.
CPI monthly since 1914, annualized rate of change. In recent years CPI was relatively tame despite a vast increase in the money supply. However, relative prices in the economy were massively distorted as a result of the latter – and this is driving ever larger boom-bust cycles. [PT]
Digital Asset Rush
The only part of our April Fools article yesterday that was not said with tongue firmly planted in cheek was the gold and silver price action (though framed it in the common dollar-centric parlance, being April Fools):
“Gold went down $21, while silver dropped about 1/3 of a dollar. Not quite a heavy metal brick in free fall, but close enough.”
Bitcoin, hourly – a sudden yen for BTC breaks out among the punters. [PT]
Keynesian Rot
The prices of the monetary metals rose $11 and ¢27 last week. The supply and demand fundamentals is the shortest section of this Report [ed note: we are excerpting the supply-demand section for Acting Man – readers interested in the other part of the report can find it here].
The eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 – prior to the cataclysmic event, numerous small earth quakes and steam venting from fissures warned that something big was about to happen, even if no-one suspected the actual magnitude of the outbreak. The eruption was so powerful that a fairly large chunk of the mountain went missing in the proceedings. There are always accidents waiting to happen out there somewhere, and the modern-day fiat money system is clearly one of them. There will be warning signals before it keels over – in fact, the final cataclysm usually happens fairly quickly, while the period that leads up to it tends to be a drawn-out affair. [PT]
The new IGWT report for 2019 will be published at the end of May…
…and for the first time a Mandarin version will be released as well.
Gold compared to other financial assets – from the IGWT chart book
The Week Ends with a Surprise
The weekly closing prices of the precious metals were up +$5 and +¢11. But this does not tell the full story of the trading action. Prices were dropping until Friday. More precisely, Friday 8am in New York, or 1pm in London.
Gold and silver – back in demand on Friday… [PT]
Special Guest Trey Reik and Board Member Jim Rickards Discuss Fed Policy
On occasion of its Q1 meeting in late January, the Incrementum Advisory Board was joined by special guest Trey Reik, the lead portfolio manager of the Sprott Institutional Gold & Precious Metal Strategy at Sprott USA since 2015 [ed note: as always, a PDF of the complete transcript can be downloaded further below].
Trey Reik of Sprott USA.
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