The CEOs of commodity-producing companies are usually knowledgeable about the supply of and the demand for their company’s products, but gold-mining CEOs are exceptions. The vast majority of gold-mining CEOs have almost no understanding of supply and demand in the gold market.
For example, like most gold-market analysts and commentators, most gold-mining CEOs wrongly believe that the change in annual gold production is an important driver of the gold price. In particular, they talk about “Peak Gold” as if a leveling-off or a downward trend in global gold-mine production would be very supportive for the gold price. This means that they don’t understand that the gold-mining industry’s contribution to the total supply of gold currently equates to only 1.5% per year, and, therefore, that changes in industry-wide gold production will always be dwarfed — in terms of effect on the gold price — by changes in investment/speculative demand. (And by the way, changes in investment/speculative demand cannot be quantified by looking at transaction volumes.)
Gold CEOs’ general cluelessness about the gold market is reflected by the performance of the World Gold Council (WGC). Every year, the WGC produces a pile of completely irrelevant information about gold.
Fortunately, understanding the gold market has nothing to do with being a good CEO of a gold-mining company. A good gold-mining CEO is someone who a) implements strategies that keep total costs at relatively low levels, b) prudently manages country, local-community, environmental and other political risks, c) ensures that the balance sheet remains healthy, and d) only makes acquisitions that are accretive.