#Gold is just above $1530/oz in Tuesday morning trading, slightly higher than the US close on Monday and today’s Asian range.
With London out for a (sunny) bank holiday, I missed the extraordinary Asian range on Monday.
I’m not sure what the trigger was, although I suspect concern about the skirmishes in the looming trade war were to blame.
The Shanghai Gold Exchange was one venue where the move in #gold played out, with heavy volume seen in the T+D contract, taking August to a record.
ETFs have continued to build tonnage over the past few days and based on our proprietary database have added just shy of 100t of #gold this month, with US-listed ETFs the heaviest buyers.
Comex trading speculators added to net-long #gold positions in the week to last Tuesday and now hold record net long positions according to my calculations...
...but as I explained last week I’m less concerned about this than I would have been 5 years ago: the move by many from OTC to exchange for #gold exposure MAY have made this less threatening than it seems.
With Real US 10-year yields in negative territory, although less negative than seen in early-Monday lows, its clear that macro factors are driving gold for now and that will likely make for a choppy outlook.
Spot #gold hit another all-time high of about $2,573/oz this morning in European trading following yesterday's move to another record high following the ECB rate cut and US PPI.
Spot #gold is around $2,567/oz just after noon in the UK.
US dollar weakness has helped #gold move higher, but gold in euros is also at an all-time-high, so gold is outperforming a weak USD.
Looking at open interest changes on the Comex #gold futures market, it seems very likely that short term speculators have been responsible for the move higher in gold over the past two days.
This chart shows the international gold price denominated in CNY compared to the domestic price of the 9999 contract on the Shanghai gold exchange.
This divergence is unusual.
Gold trading on the Shanghai #Gold Exchange has moved to a large premium to the international gold price. We've seen premiums before, but the current percentage premium is unprecedented.
Trading volumes of the SGE 9999 #gold contract are nothing out of the ordinary, so at first glance there is nothing to see here...
Putting this another way, if all the sales from the CBT have been to fulfill demand for gold domestically, then retail investment demand for #gold has exploded in Turkey.
Here is quarterly #gold bar and coin demand from our #GDT data series.
Q1-2023 saw strong demand of about 50t...
The implication is that in April alone 80t of #gold was bought in Turkey.
Turkish investors have turned to #gold to protect then from high inflation and the prospect of currency depreciation.
I'll tweet out some of the highlights from the report for those too lazy to download it.
Above: total stock of #gold above ground is about 209,000t.
Below, the value of this stock.
Note that there are substantial quantities of OTC #gold derivative positions that are not included in this total as this information is not readily or reliably available.
We've (obviously) noticed the divergence between #gold and the TIPS yield as its been going on for a while.
I beleive that this relationship, which has worked very well since the run-up to the GFC may have fundamentally changed...