RGLD, Royal Gold

rgld june 4 2016

Originally this was an oil and gas company that had to make a retreat from that business and went into the gold biz instead; very comforting to know. It is one of those royalty/streaming companies that make their living by providing capital in return for part of the “harvest”. They tend to be better diversified as they are involved with a good number of gold mining companies at once and are not that exposed to the operating vagaries of a single mine. The biggest upside is probable from increases in reserves but otherwise the performance is equally vulnerable to drops in the value of the “stuff”. The Queen has nothing to do with this, except that, in the good old days, She owned all the land and the royalties were collected on Her behalf.

    With a little imagination we have come up with a 5-wave count right into the top of $100. From there it did a clean A-B-C down, with C equal to A and a decent drop of about 75%. From here the big question is whether or not that was the whole correction or if it will prove to be more complex. Looking at other gold stocks we would hold on until this stock reaches about $70 – where the B wave has two equal legs a and c, in beige. We are not sure that one would want to wait that long.

DGC, Detour Gold update

dgc feb 26 2016dgc june 3 2016

Back in Febr. of this year we expected this stock to rise to about the level of the B-wave and then crash again. Alternatively an entirely new bull market had started at the $2.50 during the last months of 2014. (One chart is arithmetic and the other semi-log!).

This stock trades out of phase with the rest of the gang. It’s low was two years earlier than the vast majority of gold stocks. Also it is now up more than 10 times the low, a performance that no other gold stock has. At the same time it is not clear why it is approaching the all time high, when gold was at $1900, now when gold is at the $1250 level.

    Given the above , we are open to the notion that we are in a huge flat, 3-3-5 or A-B-C. It could stop here or climb to the all time high and then roll-over into the C leg which should take it below $2.50

    The last quarter income statement shows non IFRS “cash costs”at $637 per ounce and the”all-in sustaining costs” (AISC) at $824. The AISC is expected to be $940 for the near future.  These are middle-of-the-road numbers and as far as I know do not explain the large stock market performance difference. This mine is relatively new having started production a little over a year ago. For this reason it may have attracted more attention by the investing community than would otherwise be the case. We will keep an eye on it.

GLD, S&P Goldshares ETF update

gld mar 31 2016

The GLD has behaved even more poorly then the XAU, perhaps because it is, I think, an ETF that primarily holds gold itself despite the name. Because the low was pretty well at 100,  we are presently up only 15% or 1.15x. The very distinct triangle suggests that that is a fourth wave so, if anything, this chart confirms the notion that the initial leg down from the top was a 5-wave sequence for a wave A. We are now halfway in the B. Then C goes down to new lows. $137 is a reasonable target for the B wave in this ETF.

See also our previous blogs on this ETF.

Note that this is the largest goldfund in the World at 34 billion today. By comparison, the supposedly depressed price of AAPL stock still gives it a market cap of 550 billion.

G, Goldcorp update

g may 31 2016 bg may 31 2016 s

Goldcorp has behaved much like ABX, however it has not been anywhere near as robust having gained only 1.8X against 3.1X. Nevertheless the EW count is essentially the same. Either a full correction is done and over with (beige) and we are in a new bull market on our way to new highs, or, this is just a first leg up in an unfinished correction that may take us to , say, the halfway mark only to then resume the down-trend to new lows, below those of just a few months ago.

G has not yet retraced the full length of the wedge, which is sort of a minimum (unlike ABX that has done more than that). This stock may only make it to $32 (4th wave) or $35 (50%). First it needs to go lower to properly retrace the first leg up.

Personally I do not believe that we are in a new bull market. Gold stocks can easily have a negative value if the marginal costs of extraction starts to exceed the market value. 95+% of all gold ever mined is still above ground and consequently the “marginal” miner has no influence on the price when withdrawing his production. In fact gold mining is intrinsically a very stupid endeavour. We spend a fortune finding it and then another fortune extracting it. Then we bury it in a vault where it is less safe than where it was before. The whole process is quite extraordinary and very wasteful.

The XAU lies somewhere in between ABX and Goldcorp, so a little less robust than ABX but stronger than Goldcorp. The XAU is the Philly gold index which contains 13 of the major gold diggers. It is in US$$.