The gold miners’ stocks are drifting listlessly in the summer doldrums, largely forgotten by investors and speculators. They are missing a fantastic opportunity to buy low in this barren sentiment wasteland when no one else wants to. The gold stocks remain exceedingly cheap relative to the metal which drives their profits, and they continue to establish a strong technical base. They are ready to soar as gold returns to favor.

Gold-stock investing feels pretty thankless these days, like an exercise in self-flagellation. Thus there aren’t many traders left in this realm. Week after week as gold stocks continue to drift on balance, the ranks of remaining investors and speculators dwindle. Interest in this sector is among the lowest I’ve ever seen in decades of actively trading gold stocks. They’ve been left for dead as contrarians vanish.

That’s rather unfortunate since multiplying wealth in the stock markets requires buying low before later selling high! Stock prices rarely get lower than when traders universally view their sector with apathy or even antipathy. So the best times to buy low are when it feels the worst, when everyone else thinks it is crazy to deploy capital. If you want to buy stocks dirt-cheap, you have to do it when it feels miserable to do.

Ironically gold stocks have always tended to perform poorly in the first halves of summers. Yet traders so quickly forget, getting depressed again each year when summer doldrums return like clockwork. There’s no hope of overcoming herd psychology which leads to buying high then selling low without some understanding of market cycles. June and early July have always been the weakest time of the year for gold stocks.

A couple weeks ago I published my latest research on gold’s summer doldrums in modern bull-market years. They are nothing to fear, offering the best seasonal buying opportunities of the year in gold, silver, and their miners’ stocks. This chart shows how gold stocks are tracking this summer compared to their past summers’ behavior, using the benchmark HUI NYSE Arca Gold BUGS Index since it has such a long history.

The yellow lines show individual summers’ gold-stock price action from 2001 to 2012 and 2016 to 2017 in indexed terms. Each year’s final May close of the HUI is set at 100, and then all subsequent movement is recast off that common baseline. An indexed level of 105 means the HUI is up 5% from May’s close. All these modern bull-market-year yellow lines are then averaged together in the red line rendered here.

This year’s summer indexed HUI action is shown in blue. Note that the gold stocks’ drift in recent weeks is merely closely tracking their usual summer-doldrums behavior. There’s nothing out of the ordinary at all here. So far this summer, the HUI has meandered in a trading range from 2.6% under to 1.2% above its May 31st close. That’s well within the center-mass summer trend shown above, which runs from +/-10%.

There’s no reason for traders to get depressed about gold miners’ stocks this time of year when they are only doing what they routinely do in market summers. A sideways-to-lower grind should be expected, as it’s no surprise at all. Investors and speculators need to study market cycles so they understand what’s likely coming and trade accordingly. Otherwise they are going to get battered around by irrational herd sentiment.

Because of these summer doldrums, it’s usually wise to realize profits leading into summers. If the gold and silver miners’ stocks are relatively low in May, I usually exit the oldest third of my trades ahead of summer’s arrival. If this sector is relatively high and bullishness abounds, I’ll double that pre-June selling to 2/3rds of my trading book. But if super-overboughtness and euphoria reign, I take profits on the whole thing.

Freeing up capital by late Mays when gold’s strong season tends to peak is the best way to play gold’s summer doldrums, keeping it safe in cash while sentiment is eroded. That keeps powder dry to buy the resulting bargains around mid-summers before gold’s major autumn, winter, and spring seasonal rallies get underway. Summer seasonal ebbs should be eagerly anticipated to redeploy back in low, not fretted about.

We run two trading portfolios at Zeal, one each for our popular weekly and monthly newsletters. This year I sold 10 gold-stock and silver-stock trades in May and early June in anticipation of this summer-doldrums drift. Fully 8 had realized gains even in this flat gold-stock market, which averaged +24.3% annualized. The biggest win on these trades was an absolute gain of 62.7%, while the worst loss was only 8.0%.