Nasdaq breaking above 6000 has been the event of the week; especially since 5000 was first reached over 17 years ago by the end of the tech boom. The victory of E. Macron in the first tour of the French presidential elections has been a relief: after Trump and Brexit no third surprise.
The fear trade is on the back seat and gold was weaker, though ending Friday with an uptick. The yellow metal eased 1.26% over the week, closing at $1267.7. Silver continued its slide with a 4.13% weekly loss to $17.16. At 73.88, the Au:Ag ratio posts a fresh 2017 high. In the mean time Au:Pt stands at 1.343 at a sigh of its all time high. Platinum slid 2.68% over the week to $944/Oz, while Palladium confirms its outlier reputation, firming 4.16% to $827/oz.
Sliding 6.64% over the week, the HUI is leveraging down the retreating gold price. Poor operational results for Barrick contributed to this, as the miner slid almost 16%. Only few HUI components (AEM, EGO) firm against the trend. You find more on the
gold miner pulse page. The HUI residuals compared to the regression line have been
negative for several days now, indicating miners lagging gold.
Miner ETF's aren't off much better than the HUI, with declines ranging around 6%. Only SIL shows some remarkable resilience easing less than 3%, despite the silver slide. With a 4.8% decline, our
contributor driven explorer and junior miner spreadsheet is slightly ahead of most peers. The long term advance thins to 3.2% while B2Gold again posts a long term loss. We now have 8 long term advances against 11 declines.
Over the week only Oceana gold and Timmin's Gold rose (a little) against the trend, whereas the 19% slide of Sandstorm was pretty hard to digest.