Eric Sprott: Smart Investors Are Flocking to Silver

Sprott Asset Management published their monthly newsletter Market at Glance (December 2012) entitled "Why are (Smart) Investors Buying 50 Times More Physical Silver than Gold?"

Eric Sprott explains that demand for Silver relative to Gold has dramatically changed since 2008. The table below shows the US Mint gold and silver sales in ounces over the last few years:

Each year there's about 130 million Gold ounces and 1 Billion Silver ounces available per year, but due to use for industrial applications, the annual availability for investment purpose is respectively 120 million and 350 million ounces. Therefore, the ratio of physical silver availability to gold availability is roughly 3:1.

Investors are choosing to buy silver at a ratio to gold that is well above what is available. The silver price is currently mainly set in the paper market where the daily average trade on the Comex is approximately 300 million ounces. An outrageous number when you compare it to the daily mine production of about 2 million ounces, and the current price is most probably where it is because of market manipulation.

Sprott believes the current investment trend into silver is likely to continue.

The full version of the newsletters is available at http://sprottasset.com/markets-at-a-glance/why-are-%28smart%29-investors-buying-50-times-more-physical-silver-than-gold/

Rick Rule Sprott - Most Junior Gold Mining Stocks are Worthless

VisionVictory has a very interesting interview with Rick Rule of Sprott USA, where he discuses his outlook on gold and gold stocks, water, the stock market as a whole, the economy (US debt) and finally junior gold mining stocks.

This is that last part that is very important to investors. He explains that If you put together the 400 junior gold mining companies, in a good year they would lose 2 billion dollars, in a bad year 8 billions dollars. So he sees no value in this market, unless you are a very good stock picker as the top 10-15% will thrive, whereas 80% will go to their intrinsic value: 0. Rick expects this market (where you can be invested in via ETF such as GDXJ) will stay in a consolidation phase for around 18 months more, while the weaker players (the majority) go bankrupt.

FYI, Marc Faber has the same view on  junior gold mining stocks.

Watch the whole video, it's very informative.

Eric Sprott: When (Gold) Fundamentals No Longer Apply, Review the Fundamentals

Sprott Asset Management published their monthly newsletter Market at Glance (April 2012) entitled "When Fundamentals No Longer Apply, Review the Fundamentals".

Eric Sprott and David Baker explain they still don't see a recovery:

• US housing situation is still a bust with both existing and new home sales well below the highs reached in 2006.
• Unemployment is still high, and despite all the news cheer-leading, the most recent numbers show week data. and the same is true for jobless claims numbers.
• US tax receipts are only up 2% over a year (lower than inflation at 2.7%)
• ECRI Weekly Leading Indicator (WLI) has started to trend down again in April
• US Durable Goods Orders have dropped 4.2% in March, representing the largest decline since January 2009.
• China's most recent Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) indicates that China's manufacturing activity has now been in contraction for six months in a row.
• The situation in Europe continues to worsen: Spain is a complete disaster, Italy prospects do not look good either, and German PMI shows a decline in economic activity with the fastest rate of contraction since July 2009.

All those bad numbers guarantee that central banks will print money again, and the IMF most recently secured $430 billion worth of new "pledges" from various G20 member countries to increase its potential lending capacity to $700 billion in the event of further problems in the Eurozone. BRIC countries are irritated by these actions and their lack of voting power in this institution.

Possibly to counter this issue, BRICs have planned to start their own financial institution at the last BRIC summit and reports seem to indicate a BRICS central bank - an institution that could facilitate their ability to "do more business with each other in their local currencies, to help insulate from U.S. dollar fluctuations" might be created.

China has also been importing a lot of Gold via Hong Kong recently. In February, China imported 40 tons of Gold via Hong Kong, 13 times more compared to the same month last year and other emerging countries also follow suite, with 12 countries increasing their Gold reserves by more than 58 tons in March (that's 696 tons annualized). There is so much Gold bought by central banks, that Merk and Baker wonder where they'll find that Gold for delivery.

Eric Sprott concludes as follows:

We have written at length about the disconnect between the paper gold price and the physical gold market. If the demand changes stated above applied to any other market, the investing public would lose their minds. Could you imagine, for example, if the demand shifts described above were applied to the global oil market? What would happen if a single country came in from nowhere and increased its oil purchases by a factor equivalent to 30% of the world's annual oil supply? We are students first and foremost of the physical market, and the numbers stated above speak for themselves. We remain confident about gold for the simple reason that the demand we are now seeing for physical is completely unsustainable without higher prices, and we do not see that demand abating in the coming months. The US recovery is not happening. Europe is poised for yet another full-fledged economic crisis, and the BRICS countries continue to aggressively convert to hard assets like gold in order to protect themselves from currency debasement. The paper market for gold can continue its charade, but demand in the physical market will soon overpower it through sheer momentum - there's only so much physical to go around, and it appears that there are some very large buyers that are eager to take it.

The full version of the newsletter is available at  http://sprott.com/markets-at-a-glance/when-fundamentals-no-longer-apply,-review-the-fundamentals/

Eric Sprott: The Recovery Has No Clothes

Sprott Asset Management published their monthly newsletter Market at Glance (March 2012) entitled "The [Recovery] Has No Clothes".

Eric Sprott and David Baker explain that although Greece has been papered over, and many people are now bullish, very little has actually changed for the better, and it's too early to declare a new bull market has started.

Among all the cheer-leading with "good" indicators, they give some counter examples of not so good indicators:

1. Although the BLS announced an unemployment rate of 8.3%, the Gallup survey showed unemployment increasing to 9.1% in February (8.6% after seasonal adjustments) versus 8.6% in January.
2. US food stamp participation has reached an all-time record of 46,514,238 in December 2011, up 227,922.
3. Europe's 9.7% year-over-year decrease in auto sales
4. 100bp drop in the March consumer confidence index
5. 5 consecutive months of manufacturing contraction in China
6. 0.9% drop in US February existing home sales.
7. In February 2012, the Treasury reported $103.4 billion in tax receipts, versus $110.6 billion in February 2011.

They also commented on the Federal Reserve stress test on large US banks:

The test used an almost apocalyptic hypothetical 2013 scenario defined by 13% unemployment, a 50% decline in stock prices and a further 21% decline in US home prices. The stress tests tested where major US banks' Tier 1 capital would be if such a scenario came to pass. Anyone who still had 5% Tier 1 capital and above was safe, anyone below would fail. So essentially, in a scenario where the stock market is cut in half, any bank who had 5 cents supporting their "dollar" worth of assets (which are not marked-to-market and therefore likely not worth anywhere close to $1), would somehow survive an otherwise miserable financial environment. The market clearly doesn't see the ridiculousness of such a test, and the meaninglessness of having 5 cents of capital support $1 of assets in an environment where that $1 is likely to be almost completely illiquid.

They also mentioned that Dexia, a Belgian bank, passed the European stress test, only to fail 3 months later.

Then Eric Sprott and David Baker turned to their specialty: Precious metals.

Our skepticism would be supported if not for one thing - the recent weakness in gold and silver prices. Given our view of the market, the recent sell-offs have not made sense given the considerable central bank intervention we highlighted in February.

After the good performance of Gold and Silver in January and February, both markets were hammered on the 29th of February, as Ben Bernanke gave a speech (QE3 not needed) and the European central bank flooded the market with another €529.5 billion with the second part of Long-Term Refinancing Operation (LTRO).

QE3 is not off the table, just delayed, and Gold and Silver price drop was exclusively due to a sell-off on the paper market with the equivalent of 173 million ounces of physical silver exchanged between 10:30 am and 11:30 am. Compared that to the yearly production of Silver (730 million ounces), almost 24% yearly silver production exchanged in 1 hour.

An analysis of the paper-silver market shows that Silver is  traded 143 times higher in the paper markets versus what is produced by mine supply compare that to crude oil (14.3 X), Aluminum (46.8 X), Gold (69.4 X) and Copper (75.1 X) and they conclude:

The prevalence of paper trading in the silver market is what makes the drastic price declines possible by allowing non-physical holders to sell massive size into a relatively small market. It's not as if real owners of 160 million ounces of physical silver dumped it on the market on February 29th, and yet the futures market allows the silver spot price to respond as if they had.

The Gold market also looked suspicious with $3 billion of physical gold dumped into the market in a short time, and this was probably not done by speculators or investors.

They conclude as follows:

If we are right about gold and silver as currencies, and if they we are right about the continuation of central bank printing, both gold and silver will continue to appreciate in various fiat currencies over time. If there is indeed some sort of manipulation in the futures market that is designed to suppress the prices for both metals so as to detract from the mainstream investor's interest in them as alternative currencies, then both metals are likely trading at suppressed prices today.

...

The equity market rally that began in late December appears to be generated more by excess government-induced liquidity than it does by any raw fundamentals. We continue to scour the data for signs of a true recovery and we are simply not seeing it.

...

We would also expect the precious metals complex to enjoy renewed strength as the year continues. One bad month does not change a long-term trend that has been building over 10 years. Gold and silver will both have an important role to play as the central bank-induced printing continues, and we expect more on that front in short order.

The full version of the newsletters is available at http://sprott.com/markets-at-a-glance/the-%5Brecovery%5D-has-no-clothes/

Investments Newsletters and Blogs

There are lots of investment and economic newsletters around, here are the main one I follows either directly (free) or indirectly (paid one) by reading to articles or listening to interviews by the publishers.

Free newsletters and Blogs

• GMO - Jeremy Grantham: Quarterly newsletter. http://www.gmo.com/ where you get a market commentary and expected returns based on the return to the mean. Grantham is the specialist on Bubbles. You'll also get a 7-year market return forecast (for US, emerging and lumber) every month.
• Mish Global Economic Trends Forecast - http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/ - with a least three post a day and very informative. Beside economic commentary, you'll also get some more political stances mainly about the handling of US Debt and American unions by politicians.
• Sprott Newsletter - http://www.sprott.com/ - Free Monthly Newsletters (Market at Glance) about precious metals and current market conditions.
  

Paid Newsletters and Commentaries

• Marc Faber - Monthly Market Commentary - http://www.gloomboomdoom.com it costs 300 USD yer year tp get 12 monthly commentary per year. Some older samples are free. for example http://new.gloomboomdoom.com/subscribers/download/051009.pdf
• LEAP 2020 - This is an anticipation newsletter somewhat pro-Europe, but still very interesting - http://www.leap2020.eu - that cost 200 Euros per year and provide an overview of likely trends in the next few months and years. A shorter public (free) version is available every month.
• Trends Journal - Quarterly publications based future trends based on Current Event by Gerald Celente and its team at Trends Research - http://www.trendsresearch.com available for 99 USD per year (Online) and 185 USD per year (Online and Magazine). Discounts are available for the unemployed and financial distressed persons.