The New Gold Playbook: Why Gold is Still Cheap

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September 17, 2024 at 12:10 PM (MDT)|Broadmoor Hotel & Resort

Ronnie Stöferle

Managing Director, Partner and Fund Manager, Incrementum AG

Ronald, born 1980 in Vienna, Austria, is a Chartered Market Technician (CMT) and a Certified Financial Technician (CFTe). During his studies in business administration and finance at the Vienna University of Economics and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he worked for Raiffeisen Zentralbank (RZB) in the field of Fixed Income/Credit Investments. After graduation, he participated in various courses in Austrian Economics.

In 2006, he joined Vienna-based Erste Group Bank, covering International Equities, especially Asia. In 2006, he also began writing reports on gold. His six benchmark reports called 'In GOLD we TRUST' drew international coverage on CNBC, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. He was awarded 2nd most accurate gold analyst by Bloomberg in 2011. In 2009, he began writing reports on crude oil. Ronald managed 2 gold-mining baskets as well as 1 silver-mining basket for Erste Group, which outperformed their benchmarks from their inception. In 2014 he published a book on Austrian Investing ("Österreichische Schule für Anleger – Investieren zwischen Inflation in Deflation")

This is an automatically generated transcript. Denver Gold Group cannot accept responsibility for mistakes, errors, omissions, or any action taken in reliance thereon. Use of this transcript is governed by Denver Gold Group’s Terms of Use.

Good afternoon, everyone. We're on a tight schedule. So I finished a little bit late in the prior session. So we're gonna go straight to it. Got two very high energy keynote speakers with amazing content. I've had a chance to go through the slides beforehand and I can assure you it's gonna be a very worthwhile time to be in the audience. Just some housekeeping quickly in case you haven't used the app, it's the easiest way to keep track of your meetings and the agenda. So use mining forum dot app and we also have an independent news site. We recruited Christy Batten to write for us. Victor Flores has also been writing for us. So there's some incredible news that's been breaking from the forum that you can find on mining forum dot live. Let's get straight to the presentations. Ronnie Steli is so well known to us. his, his gold publications are a great resource that keeps the forestry industry and the paper and pulp mills going and Ronnie is here to tell us more about his latest findings. Ronnie over to you. Thank you very much. Thanks. Thanks, ladies and gentlemen. It's obviously not easy competing with the lunch break, but I think it's still better than competing with the drinks reception. So I hope this room will fill up and I really look forward to the next 20 minutes. Tim, thank you very much for inviting me to this conference. I'm a pretty regular speaker at the Swiss conference at the European Gold Forum and I really look forward to presenting you my case for gold over the next couple of minutes, Peter Drucker, who is a legendary austro American management guru. He said the greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence, but it is to act with yesterday's logic. And this will be one of the key topics of my speech today. Ladies and gentlemen, adaptation is crucial, not only for success but also for survival. Let's have a look at an example from the world of nature. What you see here is the so called peppered moth. Question to the audience. How many moths can you see on the screen? Four perfect. You just want an ounce of Bitcoin. So there are actually four mouth. You are totally right. Two are easy to see because they haven't adapted to the environment while the others have blended in. Now, the interesting thing about this story is the Peppe Moth had to adapt during the industrial revolution. Originally, they were mostly white with very few black spots. However, as the pollution covered the tree bark in black suits. The white moth became highly visible to predators. Soon a color adaptation appeared, this moth turned black which helped them to adapt to the new environment and survive. Ladies and gentlemen, in today's environment, not adapting to the new playbook could also be fatal. You won't, you don't want to share the fate of the white peppered moth or watch your investments crumble because of a failure to adapt to the so called new gold playbook. Now let's have a look at this new gold playbook. This chart you're pretty well aware of that. It's just the beauty I would say. Well, we have called this showdown in the price of gold already in our last year in gold with trust report, the gold price broke through its long term resistance and so on to unprecedented price levels. Gold and gold investors are now entering terror in cognitive. But what is remarkable is that all of this is happening in an environment in which according to the old playbook, the gold price should actually have fallen in the old paradigm. It was unthinkable that the gold price would trend firmer and make new all time highs during a phase of sharply rising real interest rates. Now, why is this happening? Actually, one of the main drivers from our point of view is the fact that central bank demand is now a crucial driver. Have a look at this chart. It shows global central bank gold purchases as a percent of mine production. Central central banks used to be net sellers. Obviously then during the GFC, they become net net buyers. But actually since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, central banks are actually absorbing up to 30% of annual mine production. So gold is making a comeback as a neutral monetary reserve asset. Why obviously we have seen 400 billion of Russian foreign exchange reserves being frozen by the US and the eu a move that would go down in monetary history. Gold obviously is free from having any counter party risk. And it has been has become an obvious choice for central banks, especially in emerging markets. As they realized, they have to look for stability and they have to look for a hedge against us dollar risks and especially counter party risks. Now last year, one of our central thesis has been confirmed, government bonds are no longer the anti Fragile Portfolio Foundation that they have been for the last 40 years after yields reached record low levels in 2020 were even negative. In some cases, 10 year treasuries fell by 30% while 30 year bonds even fell by 49% from their peak. But what is important is the fact that the negative correlation between stocks and bonds, which is taken for granted by the vast majority of asset allocators is the exception rather than the rule, the correlation between stocks and bonds in the US has been slightly positive in 70 of the last 100 years. So and the decisive factor for the negative correlation in the last four decades obviously was the low inflationary pressure and the very low inflation volatility during the so called great moderation. But if the relationship between stocks and bonds now reverses permanently, the basis of the 6040 portfolio, namely a negative correlation between stocks and bonds would be removed. Have a look at this picture. You remember those times when it was possible to smoke on planes. That's pictures from my friend Kevin Muir. And he said actually about the same time when they banned chain smoking on planes with your baby in your arms holding another dart, they also outlawed bond bear markets. This baby was the last to see negative total returns in bonds until the recent post COVID generation. So the big question is could bonds now hand over the scepter to gold. Let's have a look at this chart. It shows us debt held by foreign central banks as a percentage of total debt and central bank gold holdings as a percentage of currency reserves. Ladies and gentlemen, from my point of view, we are experiencing a renaissance of gold as a central bank asset in the 19 eighties gold reserves. A gold share of reserve was actually 75%. Will it rise to a level again? Probably not, but it could easily double from current levels now, I don't know if you're familiar with the world of professional wrestling wrestling. Is that something that you follow? Well, oh, sorry. So in the world of wrestling there's actually two different characters. There's the heel and the face, the face is usually the good guy, the most likable character. They are brave, honest, good looking. The heel is the bad guy. He's always evil dishonest or a cheat who complains or fakes injuries. sometimes, however, the heel becomes more popular than the face and the roles are being reversed. This is known as the heel turn the good guy. The villain becomes the good guy, the villain becomes the hero. This is an example, the rock. He used to be the get bad guy, but he was so popular that people said you got to become the good guy from my point of view, something like that. A heel turn is happening in the gold market. Gold is coming back into the system as a neutral monetary reserve asset. And the second part of this new gold playbook is a long term driver that my friend Louis and Gav called Gold as a low beta emerging market proxy. Now, what do we mean by that? Gold demand is clearly shifting east emerging markets which have a very strong cultural affinity for gold are seeing rising demand driven by growing populations and increasing GDP per capita, which averaged 5.4% annually in the last 10 years. With emerging markets expected to account for around 50% of global GDP. In 2024 gold demand is projected to rise in the long term. So this enormous amount of physical demand coming from emerging markets is a natural tailwind for the gold demand. Now, the big question is, when are Western investors coming back? Have a look at this chart. It shows the gold price and the flows into and out of gold ETF S. Well, actually from the top, we have seen 1000 tons of outflows from gold ETF S in the last four months, it had has actually kind of stabilized. So we've seen slight inflows. But a key element of this new gold playbook is the fact that Western financial investors are no longer the marginal buyer or seller of gold. The significant demands from central banks and private Asian mid East buyers is the main reason why the price of gold has been able to thrive in an environment of sharply rising real interest rates. So it seems that Western investors have initially turned down the invitation to the gold party now that the party seems to be gaining momentum. The big question is, when will they come back, will they come back late to this party when it's already in full swing? And then at a much higher price of admission. If you have a look at this chart, you can see that while gold is widely discussed, it's far from being a major portfolio component. A Bank of America study showed that 71% of us advisors have less than 1% gold in their portfolios. Now, what could change the lack of interest? What could bring Western investors back into the gold camp? First of all, it could be a recession. I I have to admit that we've been very early too early with the recession call based on a number of factors that we follow. However, if you have a look at the yield curve inversion, it's actually not the inversion but rather the the un inversion. That is actually the signal that a recession is about to come. Now, we have seen one of the longest yield curve inversions and now just recently, last week, we have seen the un inversion of the yield curve. Now, why is it important for gold? Because gold actually does a tremendous job as a portfolio hedge in times of recession. Why? Because usually when we hit the recession, central bank has hit the panic button and we also see massive amounts of fiscal stimulus. So gold works very well over the course of recessions. The second thing that could bring back Western gold investors is the realization that the debt situation is not sustainable. Ladies and gentlemen, in August alone, the US posted a 380 billion budget deficit up more than 50% from July's 240 billion US debt now is at 35 trillion. Now have you ever heard of Ferguson's law? It states that any great superpower spending more on debt service than defense won't remain great for long. That was true of the Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire and the British Empire. Now, this law will be tested by the US starting this year. Net interest payments will be 3.1% of GDP while defense spending is 3%. And most importantly, this gap is expected to grow quickly. Now, let's have a look at the gold playbook and what it means for portfolio construction. As I've said before, traditional portfolios have long been built on a 6040 mix of equities and bonds delivering very, very solid returns for the last four decades. However, this strategy was merely based on the fact that inflation volatility was very low and bonds therefore had a negative correlation from our point of view that macro environment is now over. We believe it's time to reconsider the standard portfolio and describe this new 6040 portfolio in our in Gold Trust report 2024. So we say stocks 45% bonds, 15% Safe Haven Gold, which is physical stored, gold, 15% performance, gold, 10% commodities, 10% and Bitcoin 5%. Now, we just put out a special report about the optimal gold allocation and our our analysis shows that the integration of gold into an equity bond portfolio has a clearly positive impact on the sharp ratio. So based on our calculations, the optimum gold allocation is at a range of 14 to 18%. So whenever somebody tells you, we've got a 2% allocation in gold, you can say that's basically useless from a portfolio allocation point of view. Let's have a look at the mining site. As you have seen on the previous slide, we clearly differentiate between safe haven, gold and performance, gold, gold and silver miners are obviously performance gold. Now, from a very long term perspective, buy and hold investors in gold. Mining stocks have experienced, let's say a pretty challenging and to some degree unsatisfying roller coaster ride. So from our point of view, an active strategy when it comes to your allocations in the mining space is advisable. What we've done over the last couple of years, we worked on our new indicator that we just announced very recently with a new fund that we launched. It is a so called increment active rum signal which has two different components. First of all A S A cycle signal, which is taken into consideration consideration momentum, sentiment, risk, appetite. And then on the other hand, a fundamental signal that is composed of a market environment indicator. Now, you probably ask yourself, where is this indicator now? Well, actually starting in December 2023 it moved from a neutral signal to a buy signal. So now in our farms, we are playing offense. This indicator is telling us when to play defense and when to play offense. And from our point of view, now it's time to play offense in the mining space. Now, the big question obviously is how high could gold go in a new playbook? My friend Paul Milch just said the ne the next major leg up in the gold price will prove to be a religious experience for those people. Unfortunate enough to find themselves short. Let's have a look at the price of gold in various different currencies. As you can see here since 2019 on a US dollar basis, we've seen four years with double digit returns. Gold is up 24.9% since the beginning of the year, I would say that's a pretty decent performance of gold and perhaps it will be time to take a breather over the next couple of weeks. However, if we compare it to the last big bull market 2002 until 2011, actually, out of 10 years, we've seen eight years with double digit returns. So based on the so called Tao theory, which is basically the foundation of technical analysis. Our take is we're not in the accumulation phase anymore. That was actually the time I I remember it was Denver Gold Show in September 2022 when the Wall Street Journal said gold loses its status as safe haven from my point of view. We're somewhere at half time in baseball terms fourth or fifth inning. But the fact that as you can see here, the Bloomberg median forecasts is still pretty bearish. So they are forecasting by the end of next year. A gold price of 2350 by 27 a gold price of $2000. This is actually not the behavior from analysts that you usually see at the very end of a big bull market. Now have a look at this chart. As the technicians say, the longer the base, the higher the space, let's go back to the previous big bull market. You remember the time 2008, 2009, actually, when beer Steans went down and was, was taken over, the price of gold moved above $1000 for the very first time. But then we've been consolidating and this psychologically important level of $1000 was being a major resistance. It act actually took us 18 months for the price of gold to move above that $1000 level. But then we've seen the price of gold doing tremendously. Well, almost doubling within 1.5 years. If we have a look at the current set up. Well, we've been flirting with this $2000 level for actually four years, we've been consolidating, going back and forth, consolidating in that environment for four years. Can we rule out that the price of gold will double over the next couple of years. I wouldn't think so. I would, I don't think that it's impossible. Now, everybody is, of course thinking and talking about the current today's decision by the Federal Reserve. Now, this chart that we produce is pretty famous these days where we had a look, how does gold perform 24 months after the very first rate cut? And as you can see here, it's a pretty good set up up 31% 39% up 25%. Now, I've got no clue if Jay Powell will lower rates by 25 or 50 basis points today, I would say rather 25%. What I think is that we will see some sort of by the rumor cell effect. And as you can see on this chart, quite often, the very first rate cut created some volatility in the gold price over the next couple of days. So my take would be that we could really see gold taking the breeder over the next couple of weeks. Now, how do mining stocks perform after the first rate cut also pretty positively up 267% up 26% up 29%. So from my point of view, we are now entering the sweet spot for gold and gold miners. Now, I know that $4800 sounds like a very, very ambitious price target. We've been calculating that price target based on our proprietary valuation model. Now, I know that most models don't really work in practice. Our model is a very simple monetary model where we have a look at the development of M two and then the so called implicit gold coverage ratio. And based on that model, we arrive at a price target, a probability weighted price target of $4800 by the end of this decade. Now, that might sound like a lot. But actually from here, this is an Kegger. So an annual growth rate of 11% until the year 2030. I don't think this is really an outrageous price target. And the interesting thing is actually this model is very heavily skewed to the right. So based on this model, actually, significantly higher price levels are more likely than lower prices already coming to the conclusion. But I want to say a big thank you to our premium partners because we published this report for 18 years. It's available totally for free. There's lots of copies still around. If you want to pick up one, there's 20 people working on this report. We are publishing in four languages now and it wouldn't be possible to publish this report without the support of our premium partners. So thank you very much to our partners. I'm coming to the conclusion. Ladies and gentlemen, gold has decoupled from its inverse correlation with us real yields and ETF inflows central banks and emerging markets are now the drivers, the drivers of this bull market. While we western financial investors are still on the sidelines at some point, they will probably come back. The traditional 6040 portfolio is obs obsolete because we see inflation volatility on the rise. Over the next couple of years, we're seeing a stealth bull market in gold. Every small correction is being bought. However, over the next couple of days, as I've said before, I would expect some by the rumor cell effect. We're seeing the golden week in Shanghai beginning of October, which is usually a week time. We're seeing options expiring next week. So don't fear a minor correction, the price of gold. Let's not forget that the price of gold was trading at 1801 year ago. So this has been a major, major move and our long term price target continues to be $4800. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for your attention. Thank you for the invitation. I hope that you as me as, as us will continue to trust in God. Thank you very much.


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