Adam Hamilton, a private investor and contrarian analyst, publishes Zeal Intelligence, an in-depth monthly strategic and tactical analysis of markets, geopolitics, economics, finance, and investing delivered from an explicitly pro-free market and laissez faire perspective. Zeal LLC was founded in early 2000 as a pro-free market and pro-capitalism investing and speculating Information Age financial-services company. Zeal employs innovative cutting-edge technical analysis as well as deep fundamental analysis to inform and educate our subscribers on how to grow and protect their capital through all market conditions.
You have to realize how crazy-anomalous 2013 has been. Melting-up stock markets breeding euphoria are very rare, only seen at the ends of major bull markets. Stock euphoria diverting capital away from all other asset classes is equally as rare. But if you’d told me how 2013 would play out in the stock markets, GLD, and gold, but said SLV would ignore the carnage, I would have thought that was utterly impossible.
The markets are tyrannically cyclical, every sector out of favor eventually returns to favor again and vice versa. That law of sentiment is as immutable as stock prices ultimately reflecting underlying corporate earnings. Based on today’s still-battered gold prices, a 0.511x HGR would put the HUI at 731. This is 157% higher than it was in the middle of this week even after recovering 3/7ths of its gold-panic losses!
Gold’s technical breakdown suffered in its recent capitulation selloff naturally unleashed a flood of bearish sentiment. Traders are totally convinced gold’s woes are just starting, that the worst is yet to come. This pessimistic worldview is largely universal, even among futures traders. But their collective bets are actually a strong contrarian indicator. Their bearishness peaks right before major rallies erupt.
The charts in this essay superimpose these coin sales over the daily gold and silver price action over the course of their entire secular bulls. Despite the perception of 2012 being a weak year for the precious metals, new physical demand from investors for American Eagles is actually robust to strong. This is certainly a bullish omen.
Although you wouldn’t know it from listening to all the bearish commentary out there, silver is actually enjoying a strong young upleg. Its technicals are very bullish, contradicting the prevailing pessimism gripping traders. This glaring disconnect between price action and sentiment won’t last forever. It has hammered silver stocks to depressed levels that offer a smorgasbord of opportunity for brave contrarians. As a hyper-volatile speculators’ playground, silver has always been exceptionally sensitive to prevailing sentiment. While all prices are affected by their traders’ collective greed and fear, silver’s emotional roller coaster has higher peaks and deeper valleys. Silver can skyrocket on greed like no other commodity, but the other end [...]
In order to satiate the world’s growing hunger for silver, a lot of pressure has been placed on its supply chain. And with total annual supply recently exceeding 31k metric tons (1.0b ounces) for the first time ever, the suppliers of this white metal have so far made a valiant effort to meet demand. Silver demand is on the rise for a variety of reasons, in large part due to big increases in investment demand. And this has naturally created a structural imbalance that has spawned a major secular bull market. A bull in silver of course translates to higher prices. And silver’s much higher prices have provided ample incentive [...]
Well, Americans voted and the winner is inflation. Half our voting populace inexplicably decided to award a second term to Obama. Four more years of mind-boggling record deficits and record national debt growth! Obama’s Administration spent roughly 50% more than the government took in, which can essentially only be financed in two ways. Borrowing from foreigners and running the printing presses. The latter of course is pure inflation. And the Fed bent over backwards with its quantitative-easing campaigns to buy massive amounts of the Treasury debt Obama ran up on our children’s credit cards. It created trillions of new fiat dollars out of thin air to purchase Treasuries to finance [...]
Silver is no doubt tiny on the grand commodities scale. But its attractiveness, spearheaded by a 1000%+ bull-to-date gain to its latest high, has spawned a wide range of products for investors to partake in. And one of the most unique and powerful is the SLV iShares Silver Trust ETF. This ETF’s objective is quite simple, to mirror the price of silver (minus a small management fee of course). But while simple in its objective, two unique traits have allowed SLV to take the silver market by storm. First is SLV offers a bridge for stock-market capital to track the price movements of a high-flying commodity, which historically had only [...]
With the US stock markets near major multi-year highs, traders are naturally very optimistic. Predictions abound for a continuing advance to new all-time highs. But behind this happy facade, the secular picture is actually quite bearish. The powerful stock bull of recent years appears to be topping in recent months. This means the odds are ballooning that a new bear market is being born or soon will be. Few, if any, things are more important for stock investors to understand than the bull-bear cycles. They can only be ignored at great peril. Investors who refuse to study them inevitably end up buying stocks at the wrong times in these cycles. [...]
After surging sharply in August and early September, gold stocks have been consolidating sideways ever since. Naturally this loss of momentum has sapped the nascent trader enthusiasm for this sector. But stalling out temporarily certainly doesn’t negate gold stocks’ dazzling fundamentals. They remain deeply undervalued relative to gold, the metal that drives their profits and hence ultimately their stock prices. While sentiment (greed and fear) dominates short-term stock-price swings, over the long run stock prices are nearly exclusively determined by fundamentals. Investors buy stocks to own fractional stakes in the underlying companies’ profit streams. The bigger those profits grow, the higher the stocks are bid of the companies earning them. [...]
After the Federal Reserve launched QE3 last month, investors and speculators are growing excited about its future impact on gold and silver. Though the Fed’s QE3 campaign started out relatively small, its open-ended nature is utterly unprecedented. Thus an unknown amount of future inflation will be spawned. Naturally gold and silver thrive in such environments, as they proved during QE1 and QE2. Of course QE stands for quantitative easing. Even as a lifelong student of the financial markets, I don’t recall hearing this term before late 2008’s epic stock panic. Central banks are notorious for trying to cloak their actions. So although “quantitative easing” was universally derided historically, it was [...]
It’s hard to believe that silver was trading at only $4 just 11 years ago. And amazingly it was only 7 years ago that silver had hit $10 for the first time in nearly two decades. Now at over $30 and rising, silver is flexing its muscles as one of the best-performing assets of the last decade. There’s no arguing that silver’s secular bull has been spectacular. Since its 2001 low, silver had soared a staggering 1094% to its 2011 high. And based on its structural fundamentals, silver’s bull still likely has plenty of room to run in the years to come. Investors who’ve been accumulating this precious metal over [...]
Silver has certainly enjoyed an impressive run of late, catapulting nearly a third higher since mid-summer. Because this surge looks nearly vertical on short-term charts, some traders are getting nervous about this rally’s staying power. While silver may indeed be temporarily overbought, its recent strength actually looks like the vanguard of a major new upleg. Silver’s advance is likely just getting started. Skepticism of silver’s potential continues to run rampant among speculators and investors. But this is par for the course after a major correction. Back in the spring of 2011, silver rocketed parabolic in a gargantuan upleg. But it became wildly overbought, hitting the most extreme greed levels of [...]
Silver is mined year-round at a fairly constant rate across the globe. Thus it is somewhat counterintuitive that this metal would exhibit marked seasonal tendencies tied to the calendar. But it sure does. Unlike the agricultural commodities, silver’s seasonality is driven by fluctuations in demand rather than supply. And silver is just entering its strongest time of the year, which is very bullish for it and its miners’ stocks. The primary driver of silver price action is gold. The vast majority of the time with few exceptions, silver’s fortunes are closely slaved to gold’s. Investors and speculators are only likely to plow capital into silver and drive up its price [...]
After weathering a long consolidation followed by a major correction, gold stocks remain deeply out of favor today. But this bearish sentiment is slowly yielding as gold powers higher in its usual autumn rally. Gold stocks are starting to show signs of life again. And after their strong advance since late July, they are now on the verge of a major upside breakout. Odds are this event will herald a major new upleg. Despite the gold-stock sector commanding some of the biggest gains of the past decade, gold stocks have become a four-letter word. The flagship gold-stock index, the HUI, essentially stalled out way back in late 2010. Then it [...]
Gold And Silver – Markets Provide Us The Best Information
Even with the sharp decline from last month, and the overall decline since September of 2011, there is still bullish spacing. It occurs when the current swing low is above the last swing high, from 2008. It tells us that buyers have been willing to buy into the market without waiting to see how the last swing high will be tested, an overall bullish condition.
Gold Settles Higher On May 23d – Finds Support From Drop In Dollar
With the present economic conditions in the US, there are various ways in which the fluctuations in the price of dollar will make the gold price rise and fall according to the rates. If you’re an investor, you should take into account the bigger picture so that you can take an informed and measured decision in the long run.
Gold & Silver Price Overreact to Fed Speech
The metals have been subject to the same type of trading behaviour. It became blatant once again today. In fact, it is the third time this week that we witness extreme speculation in the metals. Silver, for instance, saw its peak today at $23.20 and its lows at $22.15, a difference of almost 5% intraday. Note that the peak on the charts was during the speech of Mr. Bernanke. A bit later, prices came down triggered by one specific sentence in the speech.
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