General stock markets have been recovering from any minor pull-back over the summer to end ever stronger. As for precious metals, it's once more going from bad to worse. I haven't been upbeat last few weeks. At best metals were holding ground the last week of August. The Tuesday plunge didn't therefore come as a surprise, only its magnitude is a reason for concern. Physical demand has not yet picked up the way it did at any earlier plunge of the gold futures. This only makes the shorts bolder.
As usual, explanations for the precious metals plunge are found easily: The ECB rate-cut strengthens the USD, countering the effect of any QE policy of the ECB. The geo-political tension in the Ukraine may well cool down (?). In Iraq and Syria, ISIS meets more resistance. Even former enemies are joining forces to oppose the major evil. Explanations however fail to predict: whenever the price tendency reverses, other mantra will take the lead. On balance, gold is down 1.46% over the 4-day trading week, closing at $1268.4. Silver eases 1.39% to $19.19. Intra-day volatility has been high throughout the week.
A reality check for miners: after outperforming the metals on their way up and ignoring the initial precious metal weakness, we got a major plunge last week, with the HUI off 7.12% to 228. HUI/Gold retreats to 0.179 from 0.19 last week. For this and more updated graphs, see the GoldMinerPulse page:
http://gwyde.blogspot.be/p/gold-miner-pulse.html.
This can only end in tears for our contributor driven explorer & junior miner spreadsheet. (
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc ... qcmc#gid=0)
Indeed, we're off 6.86%: only marginally less bad than the HUI index of major gold miners. Only four miners on our list withstood the down draft, with two posting a minor gain (Monument Mining & Almaden Minerals) and two more holding ground (Mirasol and Sabina). The 21 picks going south are headed by Aurcana (-16.4%), but 7 more are down double digits. The aggregate loss now stands at 32.95%. Only Oceanagold still holds on to a tiny gain over the long haul.
In the benchmark section, the triple bear ETN, DUST got out of the red again, with a massive 18.8% gain last week. With GDXJ off 6.7% and GLDX shedding nearly 8%, we don't under-perform... poor comfort.