American stock markets have been going nowhere; gains are alternating with losses, with the DJ down a little year-to-date and both S&P and Nasdaq holding on to modest gains.
Yet that's a lot better than precious metals: after the mid July plunge, gold is grinding along its bottom. Gold closed at $1095.2 last Friday after sliding to a fresh intraday post 2010 low at $1079. Gold is down 3.36% compared to last article on July 17. For the other PM's further losses are contained to less than 1% after their disproportional plunge earlier this month.
Gold shorters failing to keep the price below $1080 for more than a few minutes inspired gold bugs to some relief rally with a 3% gain for the HUI, closing at 111.7. We've seen more up-days on the miners than further slides, yet the plunges have been more impressive, generally in excess of 4%. Moreover the 12% implosion on July 20 really crushed all records. Since previous observation on July 17, the HUI is down 13.1%. You find fresh graphs on the
gold miner pulse blog page.
Our benchmarks GDX, GDXJ and GLDX are down 10.9%, 8.3% and 8.5% respectively, all somewhat less bad than the HUI index... and similar for
our contributor driven explorer & junior miner spreadsheet, which slid 7.4%. With most of our quotes in CAD, we still have some FX tail winds. The long term loss nevertheless stands at 52.1%. Over the last two weeks, only two stock picks are up (MAG silver and Romarco Minerals, which is to be bought by Oceana Gold), while Wellgreen Platinum is holding ground. Among the 15 losses, there are 7 double digit slides. The 21% slide of Oceana Gold makes us lose the last but one long term gain. That leaves us with only MAG, one faint star in a dark sky.
I hope to be back with better news around mid August.
