In a 13th August blog post I noted that for the first time this year the sentiment backdrop had become decisively supportive of the gold price. I also noted that the fundamental backdrop remained unequivocally gold-bearish, and then attempted to answer the question: What will be the net effect of these counteracting forces? My answer was that regardless of sentiment there could not be an intermediate-term upward trend in the gold price until the fundamentals turned gold-bullish, but a $100 short-term rebound was possible even without a significant fundamental improvement. What’s the current situation?

The current situation is similar. Since my 13th August post the sentiment backdrop has become slightly more bullish, the fundamental backdrop has become slightly more bearish, and the price is roughly unchanged at around $1200. Therefore, it’s fair to say that the battle between bearish fundamentals and bullish sentiment has been a draw thus far.

Just to recap, the most important fundamental drivers of the US$ gold price are credit spreads, the yield curve, the real interest rate (the TIPS yield), the relative strength of the banking sector, the US dollar’s exchange rate, the bond/dollar ratio and the general trend of commodity prices. These are the inputs to my Gold True Fundamentals Model (GTFM), a chart of which is displayed below.

Apart from a short period from late-June to mid-July when it was ‘whipsawed’, the GTFM has been continuously bearish since mid-January. No wonder the gold market has struggled this year.

The upshot is that due to the bullish sentiment a bounce in the gold price of up to $100 is still a realistic short-term possibility, but due to the bearish fundamentals a much larger rally is not.

The fundamental backdrop is always shifting, so the fact that it is gold-bearish right now doesn’t mean that it will remain so for a long time to come. For example, additional weakness in the stock market would improve gold’s true fundamentals if it caused a significant decline in economic confidence and fostered the belief that the Fed will put its rate-hiking program on hold. However, until/unless such a shift happens, expectations regarding gold’s short-term prospects should be modest.

In a few previous blog posts (for example, HERE) I discussed the limitations of sentiment as a market timing tool. It certainly can be helpful to track the public’s sentiment and use it as a contrary indicator, and some of my most successful trades have been partly based on sentiment extremes. However, these days I place less weight on sentiment than I did in the past.

As mentioned in earlier posts, there is no better example of sentiment’s limitations as a market timing tool than the US stock market’s performance over the past few years. This is evidenced by the following chart from Yardeni.com. The chart shows the performance of the Dow Jones Industrials Index over the past 31 years with vertical red lines to indicate the weeks when the Investors Intelligence (II) Bull/Bear ratio was at least 3.0 (a bull/bear ratio of 3 or more suggests extreme optimism within the surveyed group).

Notice that while vertical red lines (indicating extreme optimism) coincided with some important price tops, there were plenty of times when a vertical red line did not coincide with an important price top. Also, notice that with the exception of a multi-quarter period during 2015-2016 when the market was in correction mode, optimism has been extreme almost continuously since Q4-2013.

In effect, sentiment has been consistent with a bull market top for the bulk of the past five years, but there is still no evidence in the price action that the bull market has ended. On the contrary, while there is a high risk of a significant correction in the short term, the long-term leading indicators I track point to the bull market extending well into 2019.

Regardless of what happens from here, five years is a long time for a contrarian to be wrong.

[This blog post is a slightly-modified excerpt from a TSI commentary published about three weeks ago. Not much has changed in the meantime.]

If you rely on the mainstream financial press for your information then you could be forgiven for believing that financial crises happen with no warning. However, there are always warnings if you know where to look.

Here are four leading indicators of financial stress and/or economic confidence that are both easy to monitor and worth monitoring. It’s likely that all four of these indicators will issue timely warnings prior to the next financial crisis and a virtual certainty that at least two of them will.

1) The yield curve, as depicted on the following chart by the 10yr-2yr yield spread.

As explained in many previous commentaries, the yield curve ‘flattening’ to an extreme and then beginning to steepen warns that an inflation-fueled boom has begun to unravel. For example, the yield curve reached its maximum ‘flatness’ in November-2006 and provided clear evidence of a reversal in June-2007. That was the financial crisis warning. By August of 2007 the ‘steepening’ trend was accelerating.

The yield curve’s current situation looks more like Q4-2006 than Q3-2007. It is nothing like 2008.

2) Credit spreads, as depicted on the following chart by the difference between the Merrill Lynch US High Yield Master II Effective Yield and the yield on the 10-Year T-Note.

Credit spreads start to widen, indicating a decline in economic confidence and/or a rise in the perceived risk of default at the junk end of the debt market, well before a recession or crisis. For example, evidence of a new widening trend in credit spreads emerged in July-2007 and by November-2007 it was very obvious that trouble was brewing.

Note that when it comes to warning of a coming crisis, credit spreads are far more likely to generate a false positive signal than a false negative signal, that is, they are far more likely to cry wolf when there’s no wolf than to remain silent when there is a wolf.

Right now they are silent.

3) The short-term interest rate at which banks lend to other banks versus the equivalent interest rate at which the US federal government borrows money, as depicted on the following chart by the LIBOR-UST3M spread.

When trouble begins to brew in parts of the banking system it gets reflected by higher interest rates being charged for short-term inter-bank loans well before it becomes common knowledge. This causes the spread between 3-month LIBOR (the average 3-month interbank lending rate) and the 3-month T-Bill yield to increase. For example, the LIBOR-UST3M spread was languishing at around 0.20% in early-2007, indicating minimal fear within the banking system, but then began to rise steadily and reached 0.75% in June-2007. This was an early warning sign of trouble. The spread then pulled back into July-2007 before rocketing up to 2.25% in August-2007. This constituted a very loud warning. After that the spread became very volatile and moved as high as 4.5% at the peak of the Global Financial Crisis in October-2008.

At the moment the LIBOR-UST3M spread is languishing at around 0.20%.

4) The gold price relative to industrial metals prices, as depicted on the following chart by the gold/GYX ratio (the US$ gold price divided by the Industrial Metals Index).

The gold/GYX ratio acts like a credit spread. This is because gold’s performance relative to the industrial metals sector tends to go in the same direction as economic confidence. In particular, when confidence begins to decline in the late stage of a boom or the early stage of a bust, the gold/GYX ratio begins to trend upward.

The following chart illustrates the long-term positive correlation between gold/GYX and a credit spread indicator in the form of the IEF/HYG ratio.

The gold/GYX ratio recently bounced from the bottom of its 7-year range. If the bounce continues and gold/GYX exceeds its early-2018 high it would be the first sign of a declining trend in economic confidence.

Currently, none of the above indicators is warning that a financial crisis is imminent or even that a financial crisis is starting to develop. The probability could change as new information becomes available, but based on the present values of the best leading indicators there is almost no chance that a financial crisis will erupt within the next three months.

A stock market crash is a different ‘kettle of fish’, because while a financial crisis always will be accompanied by a large decline in the stock market it is possible for a large decline in the stock market to occur in the absence of a financial crisis. The 1987 stock market crash is an excellent example.

While the four indicators mentioned above should issue timely warnings prior to a financial crisis, they may not warn of a stock market crash that isn’t part of a broader crisis. As is the case with a financial crisis, though, a stock market crash won’t happen ‘out of the blue’. In particular, the stock market won’t make a new all-time high one day and crash the next. This is because it takes time (generally at least two months) from the ultimate price high to create the sentiment backdrop that makes a crash possible.

In summary, short-term stock market risk is high, but there are no warning signs that a financial crisis is brewing or that a stock market crash (as opposed to, say, a 10% correction) is a realistic short-term possibility.

A few years ago I wrote a couple of pieces explaining why gold mining is a crappy business. The main reason is the malinvestment that periodically afflicts the industry due to the boom-bust cycle caused by monetary inflation.

To recap, when the financial/banking system appears to be in trouble and/or economic confidence is on the decline, the perceived value of equities and corporate bonds decreases and the perceived value of gold-related investments increases. However, gold to the stock and bond markets is like an ant to an elephant, so the aforementioned shift in investment demand results in far more money making its way towards the gold-mining industry than can be used efficiently. Geology exacerbates the difficulty of putting the money to work efficiently, in that gold mines typically aren’t as scalable as, for example, base-metal mines or oil-sands operations.

In the same way that the malinvestment fostered by the creation of money out of nothing causes entire economies to progress more slowly than they should or go backwards if the inflation is rapid enough, the bad investment decisions fostered by the periodic floods of money towards gold mining have made the industry inefficient. That is, just as the busts that follow the central-bank-sponsored economic booms tend to wipe out all or most of the gains made during the booms, the gold-mining industry experiences a boom-bust cycle of its own with even worse results. The difference is that the booms in gold mining roughly coincide with the busts in the broad economy.

Gold, itself, is not afflicted by the rampant malinvestment that periodically occurs within the gold-mining sector. Regardless of what’s happening in the world, an ounce of gold is always an ounce of gold. It is neither efficient nor inefficient; it just is.

A consequence is that gold bullion increases in value relative to gold-mining stocks over the long term. This is evidenced by the fact that the gold-mining sector, as represented on the following chart by the Barrons Gold Mining Index up to 1996 and the HUI thereafter, has been in a downward trend relative to gold bullion since 1968. 1968!!

Yes, we are talking about a 50-year downward trend in the value of gold-mining stocks relative to gold bullion. For how many more decades will this trend have to continue before analysts stop referring to gold-mining stocks as leveraged plays on the metal?

There’s no reason to expect the above trend to end while the current monetary system is in place. This doesn’t mean that gold-mining stocks should be ignored, as these stocks can generate huge profits for traders who remember to sell when the selling is good. It means that if you want long-term exposure to gold then you should own gold, not the stocks of companies that mine gold.