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Gold – Are We There Yet?

Sunday, April 7, 2013 9:40

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(Before It's News)

By Adam Brochert

It has been a 1.5-2 year sideways affair for the precious metals (PM), depending on whether you look at silver (peak in April of 2011) or Gold (peak in August of 2011). PM stocks, on the other hand, have done quite a bit worse than go sideways. While the more conservative Gold has only fallen a maximum of 20% from its August of 2011 highs, the more volatile silver and senior PM stock indices (e.g., XAU, HUI, GDX) have both fallen close to 50%. The junior PM stock sector has been decimated, with the GLDX ETF, as a representation of the very small cap/explorer sector having fallen almost 75% over the past 2 years.

One of the funny things about asset price declines is that they are met with the opposite emotional reaction of what is healthy. In other words, people should get more bullish as asset prices decline in an inflationary world, and yet the opposite happens. So, while Gold and silver are approaching the low end of their recent trading ranges, sentiment and trader positioning are at extreme bearish levels, just as they were last summer.

I am not a “pure” chartist or technical analyst when it comes to asset prices, but I think price charts tell a fundamental story rather well. Investing and speculating are risky ventures, to be sure, but we live in an era of global anchorless paper currencies. This means that the fruits of one’s labor cannot be buried under a mattress using the official medium of exchange, as these scraps of paper (i.e. currency units) received for that labor are being thrown into the air by our masters at a pace that would make even rappers blush.

Though I thought last summer’s lows in the PM sector would be enough to halt the correction and start a new cyclical bull market, one more vicious whoosh lower in the PM sector has caused all but the hard core Gold bulls to abandon the barbarous relics and the firms that waste their time digging treasure out of the ground. After all, treasure can be printed by governments and central bankstaz with a few simple key strokes, so who needs shiny pieces of metal?

In reality, we have likely just completed the 1987 crash equivalent in the PM sector when it comes to relative valuations of common stocks versus Gold. The current “Dow to Gold” ratio move has gone on much longer than I anticipated, to be sure. But it is clear to me that we are in no way positioned for a shift of the secular tides at this juncture. Here is a chart of the “Gold to S&P 500″ ratio back around the time of the 1987 crash in common stocks using a weekly log scale chart:

Of course, the Gold bulls may have been a little premature in their celebration back then as this next chart shows:

And currently, we have the paperbugs rejoicing giddily in the streets as counterfeiting enormous amounts of money has propped up financial assets to the point where it seems as though Gold is once again irrelevant when compared to common stocks using the “S&P 500 to Gold” ratio: