ALL THINGS BIG AND SMALL 2.0

A big thank you to EODHD.com for the data of XAUUSD and XAGUSD. Quality data at affordable price.   In times of uncertainty, investors turn to Gold. But spot Gold is now around USD4000 per troy ounce. On my trip down to www.indigopreciousmetals.com to buy bullion, I saw many people now buying Silver. Old folks, rich Indonesians and rich Indians. Why? Silver is not a Central Banks reserve currency like Gold, but it also has many industrial uses: See screenshot below. Besides the price of silver is only USD52 per troy ounce. XAU is Gold spot price XAG is Silver spot price. The 40 days ahead median forecast price for XAU is USD4208 and for XAG is 53.46. See charts below. [for methodology on Quantile Forecasts using Gradient-Boosted Decision Trees see previous recent posts on this blog ]. What is interesting is that proportionally speaking XAG has more potential than XAU. (The redline of XAG sits nearer the top of the green forecast band box.) And so if you look at the third chart be...

  Why? (1   - 60-70% of trades in the US equities market are done by automated AI-driven algorithms, including high frequency micro-second trading. These algorithms make their decisions not on economic or corporate fundamentals but on momentum, arbitrage opportunity, pattern recognition etc. (2  -  Previously the USD was a safe-haven currency that investors flock to in periods of economic, political or military instability. But with the chaos that is now going on in the USA, the USD seems to be losing its safe-haven status. As for Gold, it is still a safe haven asset, and recently we have seen the Central Banks of China, Russia, Japan and even some of the EU countires load up on Gold while paring down the amount of US Treasuries they hold. (3- The USD is the lynchpin that holds the US stock market and the Treasuries market together and a falling USD will make any rise in stock or bond prices unsustainable. Would you invest in US stocks if your profit is ...

  Introduction More important than the daily ups and downds of the Dow Jones, the S&P500 and the Nasdaq Composite is the big picture insights that can be gleaned from other asset classes such as the US Treasuries (Bonds) yield, the US Dollar, and the spot price Gold. Refer to the charts above. US Treasuries Yields (data from FRED the Federal Resserve Bank of Saint Louis) Theoretically Bond prices rise in an deflationary economic environment (i.e. their yields in % fall). Bond yields determine interest rates in an economy. So because demand for loans is low in slow economic growth conditions, interest rates charged by lenders e.g. banks fall, which means bond prices rise. This is because when interest rates fall, existing bonds with higher coupon rates (fixed interest payments) become more attractive to investors than newly issued bonds offering lower interest rates. This increased demand for the existing, higher-yielding bonds drives their prices up.  But our chart above s...