Trader’s Narrative

Earlier in the week we looked at the situation the gold market finds itself in with the precious metal sitting at the important $1000 level. I offered various takes on the technical position as well as the sentiment for gold. Here I want to delve in a bit deeper into the sentiment to see if we can glean whether there is any excess optimism which would flag a contrarian sell signal.

Here is the Google Trends chart for the keywords “buy gold”:

Not surprisingly, the peak occurred in the week of October 5th 2008 (3.66). The keywords: “how to buy gold” also reached a peak a bit earlier on Sept 21st, 2008 (not shown in graph). That’s still around the same time. This was, of course, right around the time that the equity market was getting a shellacking.

The term “stock market crash” reached a peak in Google searches at the same time (October 5th 2008). But right now, while slightly elevated, this makeshift indicator isn’t really signaling an excessively speculative sentiment towards gold. Of course, this is noteworthy because gold is trading about 20% higher than it was in October 2008.

In my earlier analysis of the gold market, we looked at the Commitment of Traders report, MarketVane’s as well as the Hulbert Gold Newsletter sentiment indexes. Let’s take a quick look at several other measures of sentiment for gold:

Rydex Traders
Guy over at the Technical Take mentions the asset levels in the Rydex gold fund. While the Rydex investor is the trigger happy type to jump on a trend, either long or short, there is no evidence that they have piled on gold at this time. There is only about $200 million in the Rydex Precious Metals Fund. I agree with Guy, there is a distinctive lack of froth.

Put Call Ratio
The put/call ratio for gold is also in neutral territory. This is the options data on the futures contracts which is about as speculative as you can get considering the built in leverage. There was a slight uptick in call buying as gold made its latest move towards $1000 but even as that level has been pierced, the put/call ratio has backed off (traders are less optimistic).

Conclusion
The consensus from several different measures of gold sentiment is that there is mostly a shrug of the shoulders from traders and investors in reaction to the latest rally in gold. The only conflicting data point is the CoT report which shows small speculators in the futures market heavily long gold contracts.

Gold is once again at the magical $1000 threshold. It was just a few months ago that I talked about the precious metal and mentioned that I spied the sign of a gold top. That was in early June when gold was trading at $980. That was a great call because into early July gold fell to $905.

Here are various perspectives on gold’s current technical outlook and at the end, my own take:

MarketClub
On August 6th, in a video titled “Has the bull move in Gold finally arrived?” Adam from MarketClub explains why he was (correctly) bullish. At that time, gold was trading at around $965. It dipped slightly in the following weeks and then pierced the psychologically important $1000 line in the sand.

In a more recent video, Adam asks, “Is this the move we have been waiting for?“. To find out what he thinks now, click the link or graphic to watch the video:

He shows a long term chart of gold and talks about “energy fields” on the chart. This is Adam’s name for what most others call periods of contraction in price range, which often precede periods of expansion in price range.

Adam’s got a ‘hot hand’ right now in gold as he’s been correctly calling the direction for some time. To learn more about his approach, here’s a short introduction to MarketClub Alerts. Besides all the great material they offer, what I like about MarketClub is that they stand behind their product with a 100% no questions asked money back guarantee. That’s the touchstone of a reputable and solid outfit.

DecisionPoint
Carl Swenlin’s recent commentary on gold is also bullish:
Continue reading ‘Various Perspectives On Gold At $1000′

Everything seemed to be going alright and then GE came along and whacked the markets with their largest earnings miss in at least three years.

Any way you cut it, Friday was a horrible day (for the bulls). There were 2440 issues declining on the NYSE (out of 3211) and on the Nasdaq, 2,290 fell out of 3,037 traded. Advancing volume was dwarfed by declining volume - 9:1 on the NYSE and 6:1 on the Nasdaq.

Of course, I don’t think that GE is the real cause of the market’s fall but it is a comfortable excuse for most. I outlined my hesitation that the market was approaching resistance levels and that the odd lot short sales were too high to give me reason to believe that the rally would continue.

Surveys
According to Investor’s Intelligence, newsletter editors are for the most part unchanged in their view of the market. Meanwhile, the AAII sentiment has now recovered that it is slowly approaching just a tad too much optimism: 46% bullish, 37% bearish.

The same can more or less be said for the other sentiment measures: LowRisk, Consensus, and MarketVane, so I won’t bore you with their mundane details.

Put Call Ratios
The decline wasn’t enough to push the CBOE put call ratio to parity. It climbed to just barely below 0.90 - below levels which we would associate with panic:

Before Friday’s thrashing, the small option traders as measured by the proprietary ROBO ratio had actually increased their pessimism despite the market’s recent rise. I always take notice whenever sentiment goes in the opposite direction of the market it is tracking. But again, this was before GE threw a monkey wrench into the works.

NFIB Sentiment
The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) is reporting that small business sentiment in the US is at an historic low. They have collected information from their small business members for more than twenty years and this most recent response is the gloomiest assessment of business outlook ever.

So it seems that the horrendous consumer sentiment has company.

As you would no doubt surmise, such pessimism is actually good for the market. Whenever we have an excessive level of doom and gloom, the worst is already behind us. I’m referring to the stock market here because while there may be real pressure on consumers and small businesses, the stock market is a forward discounting mechanism.

And because it looks forward while other indicators measure the past or present, it can seem to be paradoxically the opposite of the real economy.