You could say gold miners struck gold in 2016. The group, as measured by the NYSE Arca Gold Miners Index, finished the year up an amazing 55%, handily beating all other asset classes shown below.
Miners were followed by commodities at 25% and silver at 15%. Gold finished up 8.6%, its first positive year since 2012, when it gained 7.1% (Keep your eyes peeled for our forthcoming annual periodic table of commodity returns, one of our perennially popular pieces!)
I find it curious that many in the financial media continue to have a bias against gold, even though it generated better returns in 2016 than 10-year Treasuries and the US dollar, which performed half as well. And when it was up as much as 28% in the summer, they still didn’t have anything positive to say, arguing it had gone up too much.
(Gold traders, on the other hand, have a much different opinion about the metal right now. A group of traders recently surveyed by Bloomberg revealed they are the most bullish on gold since the end of 2015, soon before it rallied in its best first half of the year since 1974. The traders cited geopolitical concerns, both in the US and Europe, as well as stronger demand in 2017.)
And isn’t it interesting that the same media figures who are biased against gold are usually the same ones who seem to have only disparaging things to say about Brexit and President-elect Donald Trump? What they don’t realize is that if Brexit and Trump succeed, so too do the UK and the US Are they hoping Brexit and Trump will fail so they can be proved right?
The smart people realize personal politics must be put aside. Despite supporting Hillary Clinton during the primaries, Warren Buffett now says he is behind the president-elect—because he knows that if the US does well, he does well too. Despite campaigning hard against Trump, President Barack Obama says now we should all be rooting for Trump, regardless of our politics.
Negative Real Rates Should Drive Gold Prices
But back to gold. Coming up on January 28, we have the Chinese New Year, when demand for the yellow metal historically has risen, along with prices. This will be the year of the fire rooster, one of whose lucky colors is gold.
Throughout 2017, the precious metal should be supported by even deeper negative real rates, which could fall to their lowest level in two years as inflation outpaces nominal interest rate increases, according to UBS. In October, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen suggested there might be some benefit in allowing inflation to exceed the central bank’s target rate of 2.00% before another hike is considered, which is good news for gold. Numerous times in the past I’ve shown that the yellow metal has tended to rise when real rates—what you get when you subtract inflation from the federal funds rate—fell into negative territory.
“Federal Reserve interest rate hikes could weigh on gold prices in the near term,” according to UBS’s house view. “But as real rates fall more deeply into negative territory through the next year, we expect prices to rise toward $1,350 an ounce.”
Gold Extremely Undervalued
Since Election Day, domestic stocks have rallied 6.5% while gold has dropped as much as 7.6%. What this means is gold is looking extremely undervalued compared to the S&P 500, which should appeal to value investors.
Look at the gold-to-S&P 500 ratio below. The lower the ratio, the more undervalued the metal is compared to blue-chip stocks. In fact, gold is at its most undervalued in at least 10 years right now.
Technically, gold still appears oversold, down almost one standard deviation now. As you can see, it’s moving back to its mean for the 60-day period, but there’s still time to capture potential growth.
The NYSE Arca Gold Miners Index is a modified market capitalization weighted index comprised of publicly traded companies involved primarily in the mining for gold and silver. The S&P 500 Stock Index is a widely recognized capitalization-weighted index of 500 common stock prices in U.S. companies. The Dow Jones Commodity Index is a broad measure of the commodity futures market that emphasizes diversification and liquidity through a simple, straightforward, equal-weighted approach.The MSCI Emerging Markets Index is an index created by Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) designed to measure equity market performance in global emerging markets. It is a float-adjusted market capitalization index that consists of indices in 23 emerging economies: Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Qatar, Russia, South Africa, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.
Standard deviation is a measure of the dispersion of a set of data from its mean. The more spread apart the data, the higher the deviation. Standard deviation is also known as historical volatility.
The J.P. Morgan Global Purchasing Manager’s Index is an indicator of the economic health of the global manufacturing sector. The PMI index is based on five major indicators: new orders, inventory levels, production, supplier deliveries and the employment environment.
All opinions expressed and data provided are subject to change without notice. Some of these opinions may not be appropriate to every invest. Some links above may be directed to third-party websites. U.S. Global Investors does not endorse all information supplied by these websites and is not responsible for their content.
Read Next
