Talking turkey this post-Thanksgiving, let’s chew on the track of Gold in the above Scoreboard, which shows price in 2017 now as more buoyant than it was coming into year-end 2016. But the centerpiece trading range across the entirety of the track is the 1200 “handle”, (a trading term used to express price by a round number).
And truth be told, regardless of the endless rationale, analyses, prognostications, hype and gripe across the spectrum of Gold writers, stackers, traders and investors, Gold these past five years has pretty much made its home in the 1200s. Whilst day-in and day-out, there are expectations that Gold may at any moment suddenly be off up into the 2000s, (or in some views, boffed down into the 800s), at the end of the day, “we ain’t really going nowhere.”
To be sure, Gold’s guiding light — the debasement of currencies — traditionally has been “de rigueur” for price gains, certainly so through the mania of monetary manufacturing millennium-to-date — at least until five years ago: come 2013, Gold did not resume gaining following its fall from the all-time high in 2011.
Oh yes, since then, the Stateside money supply (M2) has further increased by 31% (from $10.5 trillion to $13.8 trillion), but it has not worked a whit into the price of Gold. Rather, Gold by the consensus of all trading pressures is being valued “in as nauseam perpetuity” around 1200. The following graphic bears this out: it charts the closing weekly price of Gold by its “hundreds handle” for the past 17 years, the last five of which oscillate in and around the 1200 handle:
In viewing price this way, you’ll recall it’s no wonder we were recently told with respect to Gold by a financier friend in Monaco: “Well, it’s dead money, isn’t it.” Moreover, we’ve poked our own fun at Gold, quipping in a missive this past May that in ten year’s time, the voice from the radio shall say: “The Dow has reached 30,000 for the first time ever, Fed accommodation pushing the money supply across the $100 trillion mark; Oil is still clinging to the 200 level, while London Gold is 1279 the ounce.” Terrific.
