Will gold continue to shine?

Gold prices have risen year-to-date by roughly $200 an ounce, impressive at close to 20%, as investors repriced the risk of a negative tail event and increased the odds of a global recession. Will gold continue to shine?

"Two years ago, I wrote about how to quantify gold’s value relative to other assets – remarks Nicholas J. Johnson, executive vice president at PIMCO – . The main point was gold maintains its real or inflation-adjusted value over long periods of time. Since the long-term value of gold should be fairly stable, its price today should move up and down in response to the movements of real yields (the nominal yield less inflation expectations) on high quality assets like U.S. Treasuries. Said another way, when real yields are higher, an investor should pay less for a zero-real-yield asset like gold, and vice versa when real yields are lower. We showed that over the last decade the market has traded gold like an asset with 27 years of real duration, so a 100-basis-points (bps) move lower in Treasury real yields on average translates to a 27% increase in the price of gold".

This year, real yields on U.S. Treasuries have moved lower by about 35 bps, which should be worth about a 10% increase in the price of gold. In addition, the value of the U.S. dollar index has declined by roughly 3% year-to-date, and given gold is denominated in dollar terms, this has also supported gold’s value since it takes more dollars to buy the same amount of gold. "So a little over half of the increase in the price of gold is explained by quantifiable factors -argues Nicholas J. Johnson – gold’s long duration properties and the fact that it is denominated in dollars, making its current price rich to fundamentals in our opinion".

In the past couple of weeks, equities have recovered nearly all of their year-to-date losses. In addition, commodities exposed to global and Chinese growth like oil, iron ore and copper are posting new year-to-date highs. And yet gold hasn’t given back any of its gains this year. "We think – underlines the Pimco's strategist – there has been large buying from commodity trading advisors and trend funds as gold prices crossed major technical moving averages. There has also been large retail buying, with assets in exchange-traded funds like GLD rising sharply year-to-date. However, these flows tend to chase returns, and we don’t see them as a leading sign of future price moves. Rather, given current valuations, these flows permit tactical investors an opportunity to move into more attractively priced flight-to-quality assets like U.S. TIPS or Treasuries".

"If long-term real yields continue to move lower, then gold will probably benefit; however, it likely will move less than U.S. Treasuries given its starting valuations. As such, we have recently been adding to short gold and long U.S. Treasury positions in some of our portfolios that allow commodity trades", concludes Nicholas J. Johnson who finds more attractive the platinum due to its higher cost of production and the fact that it is trading at about a $265 discount to gold, levels never seen before this year.