The gold miners’ stocks suffered a rough late summer this year. A rare forced capitulation walloped them to deep new lows, short-circuiting their usual autumn rally. That’s left this sector anomalously low as the subsequent winter rally gets underway, gold stocks’ strongest seasonal surge of the year. Starting from beaten-down levels after skipping the prior seasonal rally gives gold stocks exceptionally-bullish upside potential.
Seasonality is the tendency for prices to exhibit recurring patterns at certain times during the calendar year. While seasonality doesn’t drive price action, it quantifies annually-repeating behavior driven by sentiment, technicals, and fundamentals. We, humans, are creatures of habit and herd, which naturally colors our trading decisions. The calendar year’s passage affects the timing and intensity of buying and selling.
Gold stocks exhibit strong seasonality because their price action mirrors that of their dominant primary driver, gold. Gold’s seasonality generally isn’t driven by supply fluctuations like grown commodities experience, as its mined supply remains fairly steady year-round. Instead, gold’s major seasonality is demand-driven, with global investment demand varying dramatically depending on the time in the calendar year.
This gold seasonality is fueled by well-known income-cycle and cultural drivers of outsized gold demand from around the world. And the biggest seasonal surge of all is just now getting underway heading into winter. As the Indian-wedding-season gold-jewelry buying that normally fuels this metal’s big autumn rally winds down, the Western holiday season ramps up. The holiday spirit puts everyone in the mood to spend money.
Men splurge on vast amounts of gold jewelry for Christmas gifts for their wives, girlfriends, daughters, and mothers. The holidays are also a big engagement season, with Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve being two of the biggest proposal nights of the year. Between a third to a half of the entire annual sales of jewelry stores come in November and December! And jewelry historically dominates overall gold demand.
According to the World Gold Council’s latest data, between 2013 to 2017 jewelry accounted for fully 60%, 58%, 56%, 47%, and 53% of total annual global gold demand. That averages out to 55%, which is far bigger than investment demand. During those same past 5 years, that weighed in at just 18%, 20%, 22%, 37%, and 30% to average 26% of the world total. Jewelry demand is over twice as large as investment demand!
That frenzied Western jewelry buying heading into winter shifts to pure investment demand after year-end. That’s when Western investors figure out how much surplus income they earned during the prior year after bonuses and taxes. Some of this is plowed into gold in January, driving it higher. Finally, the big winter gold rally climaxes in late February on major Chinese New Year gold buying flaring up in Asia.
So during its bull-market years, gold has always tended to enjoy major winter rallies driven by these sequential episodes of outsized demand. Naturally, the gold stocks follow gold higher, amplifying its gains due to their great profits leverage to the gold price. Today gold stocks are now once again heading into their strongest seasonal rally of the year driven by this annually-recurring robust winter gold demand.
Since it’s gold’s own demand-driven seasonality that fuels the gold stocks’ seasonality, that’s logically the best place to start to understand what’s likely coming. Price action is very different between bull and bear years, and gold remains in a young bull market. After being crushed to a 6.1-year secular low in mid-December 2015 on the Fed’s first rate hike of this cycle, gold powered 29.9% higher over the next 6.7 months.
Crossing the +20% threshold in March 2016 confirmed a new bull market was underway. Gold corrected after that sharp initial upleg, but normal healthy selling was greatly exacerbated after Trump’s surprise election win. Investors fled gold to chase the taxphoria stock-market surge. Gold’s correction cascaded to mammoth proportions, hitting -17.3% in mid-December 2016. But that remained shy of a new bear’s -20%.
Gold’s last mighty bull market ran from April 2001 to August 2011, where it soared 638.2% higher! And while gold consolidated high in 2012, that was technically a bull year too since gold just slid 18.8% at worst from its bull-market peak. Gold didn’t enter formal bear-market territory at -20% until April 2013, thanks to the crazy stock-market levitation driven by extreme distortions from the Fed’s QE3 bond monetizations.
So the bull-market years for gold in modern history ran from 2001 to 2012, skipped the intervening bear-market years of 2013 to 2015, and resumed in 2016 to 2018. Thus these are the years most relevant to understanding gold’s typical seasonal performance throughout the calendar year. We’re interested in bull-market seasonality because gold remains in its stalled bull today and bear-market action is quite dissimilar.
Prevailing gold prices varied radically throughout these modern bull-market years, running between $257 when gold’s last secular bull was born to $1894 when it peaked a decade later. All these years along with gold’s latest bull since 2016 have to first be rendered in like-percentage terms in order to make them perfectly comparable. Only then can they be averaged together to distill out gold’s bull-market seasonality.
That’s accomplished by individually indexing each calendar year’s gold price action to its final close of the preceding year, which is recast at 100. Then all gold price action of the following year is calculated off that common indexed baseline, normalizing all years regardless of price levels. So gold trading at an indexed level of 105 simply means it has rallied 5% from the prior year’s close, while 95 shows it’s down 5%.
