To: jocko who wrote (2535 ) 9/25/1999 2:59:00 PM From: jocko Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 2635
Dear Friend of GATA and Gold: Can you handle even more encouragement tonight? If so, here's a bulletin posted at the web site of the Tocqueville Fund, www.tocqueville.com, by John Hathaway, whose masterful essay, "The Golden Pyramid," defined and predicted the gold market a few weeks ago. Please post this as seems useful. CHRIS POWELL, Secretary Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc. * * * By John Hathaway www.Tocqueville.com September 24, 1999 The gold market has bottomed! We are in the early stages of a short squeeze. The short interest was hoping that the gold market would collapse after the recent UK gold auction, as it did in early July. But the bids were strong and the market traded higher. In the minds of the shorts, this might have been their last hope to get out. I estimate the speculative short interest in the New York macro hedge funds alone to be at least 1,000 tons and possibly 75 percent more. As I just wrote in "The Golden Pyramid," there will be no easy way out for these speculators because there is simply no physical gold with which to cover. The pool of liquidity supplied by central bank leasing is frozen until well into the new year. Meanwhile, the stock market appears to be entering a bear phase, with a confirmed Dow Theory sell signal achieved yesterday. Look for a painful time for run of the mill equities. Gold and gold shares should begin to attract investment demand at the same time shorts are unable to cover. The situation has the makings of a huge rally. Please post this as seems useful. CHRIS POWELL, Secretary Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc. * * * A technical take on -- oh no! -- gold By Thom Calandra CBS MarketWatch SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) -- I ran into technical analyst Mike Hurley at www.eoffering.com the other day. He's got some news for the bugs -- the gold bugs. Hurley scans charts for investment opportunities, then publishes his findings at the San Francisco investment bank's Web site. Hurley has "sizing up the technicals" for 15 years at various San Francisco investment banks and research firms. One-year: XAU gold index and BKX bank index Hurley was taking a look at the Philadelphia Gold and Silver Index (XAU), a collection of the largest North American gold companies. And why not? That big London gold auction this week -- the second by the Bank of England -- was more than eight times over-subscribed. Gold prices, while in the dumps, have responded well to the British central bank's firesale of the precious metal. Gold sold for more than $270 an ounce in New York futures trading on Friday. That's the active gold contract's highest point since June 8. Hurley sees "accumulation" in some gold stocks this summer and now autumn. That means that Wall Street institutions look like they are willing to buy the stocks in increasingly large portions -- and on upticks. That hasn't happened in a long, long time. The so-called XAU gold and silver index, meanwhile, has a chart that intrigues Hurley. "The XAU looks extremely positive in its own right and may be forming what technicians call a saucer bottom, a pattern commonly found at major lows," he says. Gold stocks such as Newmont Mining and Barrick Gold often make sharp moves that are tied to the price of the metal. Nothing new there. Hurley goes a step further and contrasts the XAU with the New York Stock Exchange's Financial Index of bank stocks. Financial stocks generally lead the U.S. stock market up -- or down. And gold stocks generally do the opposite of financial stocks. These days, the gold index and the bank index are going their separate ways -- only the gold chart looks like it's rising and the bank index looks like it's falling. That means some investors might see trouble ahead for the broad market -- for whatever reason (that's another column, folks). "Investors and traders seeking a hedge against a stronger-than expected-economy and/or Y2K turmoil may now be seeing the type of investment entry that rarely comes along," Hurley says. That would be gold. The yellow metal that has lost lots of investors lots of money in the 1990s. Unless they were short-selling the stuff. Enough said. -END-