Barrons: Going For The Gold (and note the end comment)
blogs.barrons.com
Going for the Gold — and Fleeing Everything Else
Gold prices, gold ETF surge
Wednesday was one of those days that proved why all investors should have some gold as true portfolio insurance. The metal jumped $85 an ounce to over $870 an ounce in after-hours Comex trading. More relevant to the investing public was a huge jump in the popular SPDR Gold Shares exchange-traded fund (GLD), which surged 8.67, or 11.3%, to 85.46, on record volume of nearly 64 million shares—more than four times the average daily turnover. That was matched by the Market Vectors Gold Miners ETF (GDX), which was up 3.55 (11.6%) to 34.10.
Until today’s explosion, gold and gold shares had been strangely depressed throughout the building credit crisis. Indeed, there had been a steady outflow from GLD as gold’s fair-weather fans cashed out as the dollar rallied and commodities slumped. Even routs in the stock market such as Monday’s 500-point plunge in the Dow had failed to stir the metal. But today saw gold’s role as a true store of value restored, along with Treasury bills, among which demand drove the yield on the shortest paper nearly to zero. The Fed’s bailout of American International Group (AIG) did little to calm nerves in the financials. Indeed, news of a money-market fund “breaking the buck” probably did more to alarm Main Street than Fannie and Freddie, Lehman and Bear Stearns, names known mainly on Wall Street. Once the stampede started, perennial gold bears were forced to cover shorts, probably painfully. Meanwhile, on 47th Street in Manhattan — Main Street for the jewelry trade — there were no gold coins to be had, says one securities broker who tried to buy some. |
