A popular view is that gold has no monetary role to play in a modern, technologically-advanced economy. This view is wrong in many ways, including that, thanks to technological advances, gold is now better suited to being money than it has ever been. This is because technology has eliminated the inconveniences that would otherwise limit gold’s usefulness as money, with BitGold being the latest evidence.

In a TSI commentary back in 2010, here’s how I summarised the reason that gold is better suited to being money today than it ever has been in the past: “[The key is that] technology [now] allows gold ownership to simply and instantly be transferred without the need to physically move bullion. Almost all the monetary gold could remain locked in vaults, with ownership to a quantity of gold — anywhere from a tiny fraction of a gram to many kilograms, depending on what is being purchased — being effected electronically.” Previous attempts have been made to create platforms that enable gold to be a convenient medium of exchange, with ownership instantly transferred electronically when a transaction is done, but BitGold is the first attempt that stands a good chance of being successful.

The choice of the name “BitGold” was obviously influenced by the growing popularity (and notoriety) of Bitcoin, but BitGold and Bitcoin have almost nothing in common aside from being ways to store purchasing power and make electronic payments outside the banking system. Importantly, BitGold doesn’t have Bitcoin’s flaws, the most serious of which is that a Bitcoin, like a dollar or a Yen or a Ruble, has no use outside of its role as a medium of exchange.

Rather than being an electronic medium of exchange itself, BitGold is a platform for trading a substance (gold) that has historically been the world’s premier medium of exchange. Putting it another way, users of the BitGold system are not trading computer ‘bits’, they are trading ownership to specific pieces of physical gold stored in a vault.

To be fair, Bitcoin has one significant advantage over BitGold. The beauty of Bitcoin is total decentralisation. There are no intermediaries. There is also no need to jump through the personal ID (Know Your Customer) hoops established by the banking system at the behest of government. With BitGold there are intermediaries (vaults and insurance companies), and all the usual banking-system requirements apply.

As far as I can tell, there is no way to use technology to quickly/efficiently transfer ownership of gold without using intermediaries responsible for storing the gold and keeping it safe. On the plus side, with BitGold the storage is outside the banking system and there are several options regarding geographical location.

I’m not going to explain all the benefits of BitGold and how it works, because that’s already been done in a number of places on the internet. For example, Bob Moriarty provides a good overview HERE. I like BitGold, the product, a lot, and will probably open an account in a couple of months if it operates smoothly during the intervening period. But BitGold, the stock, is a different kettle of fish.

BitGold shares (TSXV: XAU) listed at the same time as the company opened its virtual doors to customers. This is strange. Normally, a company will have operating history before it lists on a stock exchange. Was it a deliberate ploy to float the company on the stock market before there were any hard data that could be used to value the shares? If so it worked, because the shares immediately attained what appears to be a very high valuation. I say “appears to be” in the previous sentence because, with no operating history to go by, it is impossible to even guesstimate what the company is worth. What I can do, however, is roughly determine the amount of success built into the current stock price.

At last Friday’s closing price of C$4.14 and with around 37M shares outstanding, XAU’s market cap is C$153M. This equates to US$126M at the current exchange rate. How many users would BitGold need to justify this market cap?

BitGold makes money on transaction volume — on the purchase/sale of gold. Specifically, it takes 1% of every purchase and every sale of gold made through the BitGold system. Users of the BitGold system are not charged anything for gold storage and insurance, meaning that all costs of running the system must come out of the aforementioned 1% and that whatever is left becomes BitGold’s gross profit. For the purposes of this exercise I’m going to ignore these costs and make the assumption that due to its strong growth potential the company is worth 10-times its annual sales revenue. Based on this assumption, the current market cap of US$126M would be justified by annual sales of roughly US$13M. To get $13M of sales, BitGold would need annual transaction volume of US$1.3B.

Now, the company guesses that its average annual transaction volume per user will be $1000-$2000. If I divide this range into the $1.3B implied by the current market cap, I get a range of 650K-1.3M. In other words, this method of valuation suggests that the current share price is discounting a customer base in the 650K-1.3M range.

As an aside, it is clear that BitGold will need a fairly high average transaction volume per user to be meaningfully profitable. However, it’s a good bet that many of the users will initially be ‘goldbugs’ who will use the service to make long-term investments in physical gold. Based on its current fee structure, BitGold would be more likely to lose money than make money from this type of customer.

Taking another valuation approach, BitGold has been likened to PayPal so perhaps it would make sense to compare BitGold’s valuation to PayPal’s valuation. PayPal is apparently being valued at $84 per user, but there are three reasons — not even taking into account the fact that PayPal is a major success while BitGold’s success is not yet assured — that BitGold’s valuation should be significantly lower than PayPal’s. The first is that PayPal has no storage and inventory costs to absorb. The second is that PayPal is solely a vehicle for transferring a medium of exchange whereas many of BitGold’s customers will use the service for store-of-value purposes*. The third is that the BitGold service is not available to US citizens. I’ll therefore assume that BitGold’s per-user value is a little lower than PayPal’s.

Assuming $70/user, BitGold’s current market cap implies a user base of 1.8M.

Based on the valuation methods outlined above and the company’s own growth projections, it seems to me that if all goes well then BitGold could grow into its CURRENT market cap in 2-3 years. This means that great success has already been priced in, leaving plenty of risk and no valuation-related upside for new buyers of the shares. Of course, there will always be upside potential due to the pool of greater fools, especially considering that the supply of XAU shares is small at this time.

The bottom line is that BitGold, to me, is like Amazon.com: I love the product, but hate the stock’s current valuation.

*Gresham’s Law is an obstacle to BitGold’s profitability, in that the sort of people who would want to own physical gold would be more likely to spend their fiat currency than their gold. That is, they would tend to hoard their gold and spend their dollars, euros, etc., thus reducing BitGold’s revenue per user.

Gold bullion and the Gold BUGS Index (HUI) are close to breaking out to the upside on the daily charts. As shown below, the US$ gold price is butting up against lateral resistance that also now coincides with the 200-day moving average (MA), and the HUI is struggling with resistance defined by a trend-line that dates back to the August-2014 short-term top. Are they going to break out and what will it mean if they do?

While I expect that gold bullion and the HUI will rise to much higher levels during the second half of this year, I don’t have a strong opinion on whether they will break above their nearby resistance levels within the next few weeks. If I had to make a guess I’d say that they will break out within the next few trading days, but this is not something I’m betting on. In any case, if breaks above these resistance levels occur in the near future it won’t mean much. In particular, multi-week tops could follow closely on the heels of upside breakouts.

The reason that breaks above the aforementioned resistance levels won’t mean much is that the resistance levels, themselves, aren’t important. For one, gold’s resistance at $1220 is primarily defined by a few minor spike-highs over only the past two months (the 200-day MA is not usually a significant resistance level for gold). For another, angled lines drawn on charts, such as the lines drawn on the HUI chart displayed above, are always subjective interpretations and somewhat arbitrary.

By the way, GDX and the XAU have already broken above similar lines to the line drawn on the above HUI chart. Here’s an XAU chart showing the breakout. In the grand scheme of things, this breakout doesn’t matter.

The point I want to make is although breaks above the price-related obstacles that are currently being challenged won’t give us useful new information, it won’t take much additional strength from here to effect upside breakouts that really do mean something. For example, in terms of confirming a major turn to the upside the HUI resistance that matters is in the low-200s, or only about 10% above Thursday’s high.

To the Keynesian economist, the world of economics is a sequence of random events — an endless stream of anecdotes. Things don’t happen for any rhyme or reason, they just happen. And when they happen the economist’s first job is to come up with an explanation by looking at the news of the day, because there will always be current events that can be blamed for any positive or negative developments.

It’s futile to look any deeper, for example, to consider how policies such as meddling with interest rates might have influenced investment decisions, because, even though the real-world economy involves millions of individuals making decisions for a myriad of reasons, the individual actors within the economy supposedly form an amorphous mass that shifts about for unfathomable reasons. In fact, in the Keynesian world the economy can be likened to a giant bathtub that periodically fills up and empties out for reasons that can’t possibly be understood, although if an explanation that goes beyond the news of the day is needed the economist can always fall back on “aggregate demand” or its more emotional cousin — “animal spirits”. Specifically, a slowing economy can be said to be the result of falling “aggregate demand”, and when the pace of economic activity is rapid it can be said to be the result of surging “animal spirits”. There’s no need to try to explain the changes in these mysterious entities, because they are inexplicable. They just happen.

Having explained what’s happening to the economy by pointing at seemingly random/unpredictable events or citing unfathomable changes in “aggregate demand”, the economist’s second job is to recommend a course of action. And since the economy can supposedly be likened to a bathtub filled with an amorphous liquid, the level of which periodically rises and falls, it’s up to the economist to suggest ways that add liquid when the level is too low and drain liquid when the level is too high.

Fortunately, adding and draining liquid is very easy to do. For example, to add liquid all that has to be done is for the government to increase its spending and/or for the central bank to create some money out of nothing. It doesn’t matter that the government’s spending is unproductive and that the central bank’s money-pumping falsifies the price signals upon which the market relies; it only matters that more liquid is added to the bathtub.

This approach to economics might seem ad-hoc. It might seem superficial. And it might seem short-sighted. That’s because it is all of these things, which is why Keynesian Economics should be re-branded ASS (Ad-hoc, Superficial and Shortsighted) Economics.

The price of a commodity futures contract is not the market’s forecast of what the spot price will be in the future. For example, the fact that at the time of writing the price of the December-2016 WTI Crude Oil futures contract is $64.44 does not imply that ‘the market’ expects the price of oil to rise from around $59 (the current spot price) to around $64 by the end of next year. Moreover, the true message of the difference between the futures price and the spot (cash) price can be the opposite of the superficial message, in that the lower the futures price relative to the spot price the more bullish the price implication. If you understand why this is so then you understand more than former Fed chief and present-day blogger Ben Bernanke about how the commodity futures markets work, which, admittedly, is not saying very much.

Part of the reason that the price of a commodity futures contract is not a prediction of the future price of the commodity is that many of the largest participants in the futures markets do not buy/sell futures contracts based on a forecast of what’s going to happen to the price. Instead, they use the futures market to hedge their exposure in the cash market. For example, when an oil producer sells oil futures it is probably doing so because it wants to lock-in a cash flow, not because it expects the price to go down.

The main reason, however, is that the difference between the futures price and the spot price is driven by arbitrage and, in all commodity markets except the gold market, the extent to which current production is able to satisfy current demand (in the gold market there can never be a supply shortage because almost all of the gold mined in world history is still available to meet current demand). In effect, regardless of what people think the price of the commodity will be in the future, arbitrage trading will prevent the futures price from deviating from the spot price after taking into account the cost of credit (the interest rate) and the cost/availability of storage.

Considering the case of the oil market, I mentioned above that the spot price is currently about $59 and the price for delivery in December-2016 is about $64. This $5 difference does not imply that ‘the market’ expects the price of oil to be $5/barrel higher in December-2016 than it is today; it implies that the cost of storing oil for the next 18 months plus the interest income that would be foregone (or the interest that would have to be paid) equates to about $5/barrel. If not, there would be a risk-free arbitrage profit to be had.

For example, if a large speculator who was very bullish on oil bid-up the price of the December-2016 oil contract from $64 to $70, it would create an opportunity for other traders to lock-in a profit by purchasing physical oil and selling the December-2016 futures with the aim of delivering the oil into the contracts late next year. This trade (selling the December-2016 futures and buying the physical) would continue until the difference between the spot and futures prices had fallen by enough to eliminate the profit potential.

For another example, if a large speculator who was very bearish on oil aggressively short-sold the December-2016 oil contract, driving its price down from $64 to $60, it would create an opportunity for other traders to lock-in a profit by selling physical oil and buying the December-2016 futures with the aim of eventually replacing what they had sold by exercising the futures contracts. Even though in this example the December-2016 futures contract is still $1 above the spot price, there is a profit to be had because the cost of storage plus the time value of money amounts to significantly more than the $1/barrel futures premium.

I also mentioned above that the true message of the difference between the futures price and the spot (cash) price can be the opposite of the superficial message, in that the lower the futures price relative to the spot price the more bullish the price implication. I’ll use the same oil example to explain why.

As I pointed out, if the futures price falls by enough relative to the spot price it will lead to a situation where there is an essentially risk-free arbitrage profit to be made by selling the physical and buying the futures. However, this trade is only possible if the physical market is well supplied. If this isn’t the case and all the oil being produced is needed for current consumption, then the price of oil for future delivery can drop to an unusually low level relative to the spot price and stay there. If the current supply situation is tight enough then the futures price could even drop below the spot price. That’s why a sustained situation involving an unusually-low futures price relative to the spot price has bullish, not bearish, price implications.

My final point is that one of the most important influences on the difference between spot and futures prices for many commodities is the prevailing interest rate. In the gold market it is the most important influence by a country mile. The lower the interest rate the smaller the difference will tend to be between the spot price and the prices for future delivery, so in a world dominated by ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy) the differences between spot and futures prices will generally be smaller than usual.

In conclusion, anyone who views an unusually-large premium in the commodity futures price as bullish and an unusually-low (or negative) premium in the commodity futures price as bearish is looking at the market bass-ackwardly.