15 Comments
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Leon's avatar

GDX changed the index it tracks in September, a bunch of miners were sold and reduced as a result, One would assume this may be the main factor for the outflows last month?

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Jeff Menna's avatar

GDX is up 117% year to date so how does that equate to a net outflow?

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FreeLunch's avatar

The fund can choose to buy its own ETF in the market, redeem it to itself, i.e. destroy the certificate it just bought, and sell a pro rata amount of stocks. This will result in:

- Upward price pressure in the ETF, since the fund buys

- Downward price pressure in the underlying holdings, since the fund sells those

- "Outflow" from the fund, since the certificate is redeemed.

Actually anybody with the right to redeem ETFs and sell underlyings can do that, with the same effect.

The incentive to do that arises when there's a large enough price difference in the market between the ETF price and the underlying price(s). Large enough to overcome transaction and redemption costs.

I.e. "outflow" doesn't mean that people are not interested in the industry, it just means that the ETF price has been lagging the underlying stock prices, and people capitalized on the price difference. Or another way to say it is that buyers have been buying one or more of the underlying stocks, hiking up their price rather than that of the ETF, and arbitrageurs with redemption rights cashed in on the opportunity to sell them those stocks and buy the ETF at a slightly lower price.

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Jay Bremyer's avatar

Succinct. Enough said. It's a gift.

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FreeLunch's avatar

Gold and bitcoin have a P/E of infinity, with tesla a distant second. One might wonder if that makes them equivalent investments, since clearly earnings have little relevance to their price. A core ingredient seems to be the fact that they are somewhat shiny objects that are more difficult to create than the money they are bought for. Which begs the question: Is tesla, or the any of the mag7 difficult to create? Or to copy? Or to be more specific: Is a mag7 share difficult to copy? Well you could dilute the shares for a paper money injection, or you might be a Chinese oligarch and create your own tesla industry. As for bitcoin, as Doug once noted, it has the advantage over gold of being easily transferable. Even though both gold and bitcoin are difficult to create, gold is difficult to destroy whereas bitcoin is easy to destroy: Either lose your 24 words, or make backups and have one of them stolen. Which is a simple model of why central banks might have chosen gold over bitcoin, fiat and tesla, if that's the choice.

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AB's avatar

Any recommended miners?

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AB's avatar

👍

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Matt Smith @ Crisis Investing's avatar

Plenty in the portfolio for paid subscribers

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Nelson McHenry's avatar

With short paper traders that you can set your watch with every morning at 8 for along time in the end it hasn't worked. Denial is a natural reaction that too will pass.

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Mike from Toronto's avatar

I suspect the big money is suppressing the price of the miners at every possible chance, to buy up every share possible from nervous and disgruntled investors. It’s a negative feedback loop - share prices not really moving as much, frustrating investors when they see gold hitting ATHs continuously. Silver miners - very frustrating when silver has all the fundamentals for much higher prices at a time when the psychological $50 is within reach. It’s crazy

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Matt Smith @ Crisis Investing's avatar

GDX is up 128% YTD

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Steve Gorman's avatar

Matt, my conclusion upon reading this article was that GDX was underperforming GLD YTD and this mispricing shouldn't last forever. As you note, GDX is up 128% which is about 3x GLD. Even if the miners represent an all time low of 1% of global equities, I don't see the conclusion that GDX is undervalued. Can you explain or elaborate? Thx.

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Cris Bot's avatar

I've been wondering about these flows as well. Maybe q3 earnings will reverse the flows into miners? Probably not. Also the normie public are not paying attention to the miners, either they've been burned badly in the past or they're just obsessed with ai/crypto. I don't know anyone that can name one miner. Things seem to be doing amazing flying under the radar, maybe this is the right strategy is not say anything.

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Shaun Meredith's avatar

Could the outflows be due to shorts needing to be sold?

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John Chittick's avatar

Could it be explained by two types of traders, those who love the metal and its safety in physical presence and in the knowledge that it will hold or increase its relative value over time, versus those who can see its bull market and buy the leveraged proxy as a rotation trade but being unsure of the duration of the trend, take profits frequently.

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