Trader Dan: Hedge funds buying gold again

Welcome to the Precious Metals Bug Forums

Welcome to the PMBug forums - a watering hole for folks interested in gold, silver, precious metals, sound money, investing, market and economic news, central bank monetary policies, politics and more. You can visit the forum page to see the list of forum nodes (categories/rooms) for topics.

Please have a look around and if you like what you see, please consider registering an account and joining the discussions. When you register an account and log in, you may enjoy additional benefits including no ads, market data/charts, access to trade/barter with the community and much more. Registering an account is free - you have nothing to lose!

pmbug

Your Host
Administrator
Benefactor
Messages
13,951
Reaction score
4,365
Points
268
Location
Texas
United-States
...
Now that there are some concerns about global growth and equities are looking a bit wobbly, gold is getting a bit of a look from some speculators who are cautious at the moment. This can be seen in the return of some hedge funds to the long side of the gold market at the Comex ( although I should note that the gold ETF, GLD, continues to display an amazing lack of interest on the part of big Western-based institutional buyers ).

The blue line shows the NET POSITIONING of the hedge fund community. The Red line shows the gold price. As you can see, as the NET LONG Position has increased, so has the gold price. The two track each other EXACTLY.

Something I do want to note however that really stands out for me when I see this chart and analyze it in detail.

Beginning in 2013, while the relationship between the gold price and the net positioning of the hedge fund community remained intact, something happened. Can you see it?

From that point forward, the build in NET LONG positions by the Hedge funds HAS NOT resulted in successively higher gold prices. The opposite is the case. In other words, it is taking more and more buying by Hedge funds to move the price of gold higher but the end result is that the gold price is at lower levels than such levels of net longs would have taken it in the past.

For instance, look at this week's net long level by the hedge funds. It is currently a bit over 106,000 futures and options combined. A similar level of hedge fund exposure to the gold market back in January 2013 had gold sitting above $1650!

How to explain this ? Simple - While hedge funds have been recently expressing an interest in playing gold from the long side over the Comex, there remains a correspondingly increasing amount of WILLING SELLERS of the metal. To see gold sitting closer to $1200 than it is to $1700 when the net long positions of the hedge fund are at the same level as they were TWO YEARS ago tells me that a very large number of players in gold do not expect high prices in gold to last.
...

More (incl. graph): http://traderdannorcini.blogspot.com/2015/01/large-speculators-returning-to-gold-but.html

It would be interesting to know who the WILLING SELLERS are. Are they also hedge funds, or central banks (or their proxies)?
 
Back
Top Bottom