- TSI Blog - https://tsi-blog.com -

Gold Leads Silver

Posted By Steven Saville On February 20, 2018 @ 8:23 am In Uncategorized | Comments Disabled

It is widely believed that silver leads gold during bull markets for these metals. I wonder how this belief first arose and persists to this day given that it is contrary to the historical record.

It is partially true that silver outperforms gold during precious-metals bull markets. In particular, it’s true that silver tends to achieve a greater percentage gain than gold from bull-market start to bull-market end. It’s also the case that silver tends to do better during the final year of a cyclical bull market and during the late stages of the intermediate-term rallies that happen within cyclical bull markets. However, the early stages of gold-silver bull markets are characterised by relative strength in gold.

Gold’s leadership in the early stages of bull markets is evidenced by the following long-term chart of the gold/silver ratio. The boxes labeled A, B and C on this chart indicate the first two years of the cyclical precious-metals bull markets of 1971-1974, 1976-1980 and 2001-2011, respectively. Clearly, gold handily outperformed silver during the first two years of each of the last three cyclical precious-metals bull markets that occurred within secular bull markets.

gold_silver_200218 [1]

Now, in the same way that all poodles are dogs but not all dogs are poodles, the fact that gold tends to strengthen relative to silver in the early years of a precious-metals bull market doesn’t mean that substantial strength in gold relative to silver is indicative of a precious-metals bull market in its early years. For example, there was relentless strength in gold relative to silver from mid-1983 until early-1991 that took the gold/silver ratio as high as 100, but there was no precious-metals bull market during this period.

Between mid-1983 and early-1991 there was, however, a multi-year period when gold, silver, most other metals and mining stocks offered very profitable trading opportunities on the long side. I’m referring to 1985-1987. We are probably in a similar period today, with the next buying opportunity likely to arrive before the end of this quarter.

[2] [3]

Article printed from TSI Blog: https://tsi-blog.com

Copyright © 2014 The Speculative Investor. All rights reserved.