Assessing The Short-Term Outlook For The Precious Metals And The Miners

Precious metals expert Michael Ballanger assesses the gold-silver ratio and its ramifications for the market.

Gold-Silver Ratio Chart

I want to go on the record and state categorically that, in my opinion, technical analysis is of limited value when trying to predict the short-term movements of precious metals. However, there are millions of traders and investors out there who believe that it does work despite interventions, manipulations, and the ability of the bullion banks to fabricate a surrogate for actual physical gold by way of paper futures. In light of that, the short-term technical set-ups for gold and silver and the miners are all different in that after Friday's month-end bombardment, which originated in the London options market, that formidable uptrend line that began in December 2015 has finally been vanquished. The ramifications could be nasty next week because for the second year in a row, the seasonally strong month of September failed to shine (at least for gold). The big question is now whether or not we get a follow-through to the 200-dma at $1,252 before resuming the uptrend or will that large Commercial short position serve as a demand catalyst and limit any meaningful downside? Continue reading "Assessing The Short-Term Outlook For The Precious Metals And The Miners"

All Hail the Mighty Silver Bugs...

Precious metals expert Michael Ballanger examines silver's recent moves upward.

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In my business, there is a great deal of travel, be it to properties in the Peruvian Andes or the Canadian Yukon or to the investment conferences in New Orleans or San Francisco or London, so I get a full psychographic cross section of every type of investor imaginable. First of all, the audiences I have encountered at the "Sound Money" conferences in Nassau or Bermuda are usually quite conservative and usually well-dressed and well-groomed. When the topic is gold and it is a controversial speaker looking for "the end of Western civilization," the audiences tend to be a tad different with hair length and dress code noticeably more avant-garde.

However, when the topic is confined to silver, while the speakers tend to be "evangelical," the audiences appear to be (operative word being "appear") simply stark-raving madmen of the first order. They usually dress in military fatigues, the males are all in ponytails, the women weigh more than the men, and the T-shirts and baseball caps on both males and females carry logos from either the WWF or the Monster Truck conventions. However, they are usually quite erudite when discussing "survival techniques"; they are usually extremely well educated and they are all able to rhyme off the silver production numbers for the past 20 years BY COUNTRY; and most importantly, they carry high distain for anyone who fails to know these facts. Continue reading "All Hail the Mighty Silver Bugs..."

The Gold-to-Silver Ratio: A Truly Generational Opportunity

Precious metals expert Michael Ballanger says that owning silver versus owning gold is a high-probability trade that could be the 2016 Trade of the Year.

Daily GDX Chart

This week's Gong Show in the global financial markets reminds me of the early 1980s before the advent of the Internet or online trading or blogs and especially before 30-something financial "advisors" were allowed to go on the national (and international) airwaves or Internet websites and babble on for what seem like days how "The Fed has our back!" as an excuse for buying stocks at 23 times forward earnings.

Back then, at 4:15 every Friday night, there would be a line-up of brokers and analysts (even the janitor) next to the old teletype machine (I am imagining more than a few raised eyebrows among the kids out there as they quickly Google search "teletype machine" on their Smartphones while sipping a $10 cup of fancy-ass coffee) in expectation of the all-important "Money Supply" numbers that everyone supposed was going to give them a hint as to when interest rates would start to decline from 16%-plus nosebleed levels of the early 1980s. Continue reading "The Gold-to-Silver Ratio: A Truly Generational Opportunity"