Cycles and Sentiment
Another recurring pattern consists of the seasonally strong period in gold around the turn of the year, which is bisected by a mid to late December interim low in the gold price. An additional boost can be expected in January and Feburary from the strong seasonal uptrend in silver and platinum group metals as well (to see the seasonal PGM charts, scroll down to our addendum to this recent article by Dimitri Speck).
Rallies in silver tend to be quite supportive for precious metals stock indexes, as silver stocks have an even higher beta than their gold brethren (note in this context that the XAU is the more broad-based of the two indexes these days and contains far more silver stocks than the HUI – see these lists of the current XAU and HUI constituents for details).
Below is the 20-year seasonal gold chart, with the period from the December 20 interim low to the late February peak highlighted. Note that the statistical data shown on the chart refer specifically to the highlighted period, which in turn is an average of the action at this time of the year over the past 20 years.
Obviously, there are years in which no gain is achieved in the seasonally strong period, but over the past 20 years the probability that prices would rally was 70% (14:6 = 7:3). Moreover, while the gains in profitable years ranged from +8.52 to +17.98%, losses were much smaller, confined to a range of just -1.60 to -3.30%.
This post was published at Acting-Man on December 28, 2017.