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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold Price Monitor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: long-gone who wrote (40749)	9/24/1999 10:50:00 AM
From: Alex	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116764

A technical take on -- oh no! -- gold By Thom Calandra, CBS MarketWatch Last Update: 10:29 AM ET Sep 24, 1999More StockWatch Commentary New! 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. Hurley was taking a look at the Philadelphia Gold and Silver Index ($XAU: news, msgs), 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 $270 an ounce in New York futures trading (GC=Z9: news, msgs) on Friday. That's the active gold contract's highest point since June 8. Hurley sees "accumulation" in some gold stocks this summer and now, the autumn. That means Wall Street institutions look like they are willing to buy the stocks in increasingly large portions -- and on upticks. That hasn't happened in a long, long time. The so-called XAU gold and silver index, meanwhile, has a chart that intrigues Hurley. "The XAU looks extremely positive in its own right and may be forming what technicians call a saucer bottom, a pattern commonly found at major lows," he says. Gold stocks such as Newmont Mining (NEM: news, msgs) and Barrick Gold (ABX: news, msgs) often make sharp moves that are tied to the price of the metal. Nothing new there. Hurley goes a step further and contrasts the XAU with the New York Stock Exchange's Financial Index of bank stocks ($NF: news, msgs). Financial stocks generally lead the U.S. stock market up -- or down. And gold stocks generally do the opposite of financial stocks. (In the above chart, we compare the XAU with the Philadelphia Bank Index ($BKX: news, msgs).) These days, the gold index and the bank index are going their separate own 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. cbs.marketwatch.com