The John Brimelow Report
India buying: The breakout will look like this
Thursday, November 4th 2004
Indian ex-duty premiums: AM $5.02, PM $8.25, with world gold at $427.30 and $426.80. A little thin, and lavishly ample, for legal imports. This is basis Bombay: other Indian reporting cities were more robust in the morning. The rupee strengthened to an import-helpful 5 month high today.
Gold moved up sharply on good volume in ACCESS trading yesterday afternoon in NY. TOCOM was a bystander – volume was down 47% to only 13,831 Comex equivalent. Both Mitsui-HK and Barclays report that the upswing was stopped by "heavy physical selling" in the Asian morning.
The ACCESS based nature of the rally suggests that a good part of Monday’s selling was shorting, which was being covered last night and this morning. But the Indian prices and of course the general dollar decline today are conducive to the quadruple $430-32 top finally being overcome. Since this is also a multi-year top, the prospects for a substantial advance powered by technical opportunists are material.
This was caught well by gold’s new friend, Dennis Gartman, writing very early this morning:
"SPOT GOLD; One Consolidation After Another, It Makes Its Way Steadily Higher:
One really can't help but be fascinated by the relentless manner in which gold (herein priced in US dollar terms) continues to trend higher. Certainly there is someone or something selling gold at the $428-431 level that has "kept a lid" on prices since late last year, but it would appear that it is but a matter of time until that resistance is
overcome and prices head to new highs once more. We are bullish and we are long. We look to become longer still.
He subsequently adds:
"Regarding our real interest at the moment, gold, we are bullish of it, and have been for quite some while. Firstly, not wishing to continue a long standing "debate" with the people from GATA, we have again gotten a number of "notes" from GATA followers who continue to take us to task for our doubts concerning their central thesis that the central banks and Wall Street/Bay Street/Lombard Street are conspiratorially allied in trying to keep gold prices down. We are bullish of gold, as are they; however, we are still considered "apostate" for we are not bullish for the same reasons that they are. We can only smile and say "Thanks" when confronted by GATA's followers.
Nonetheless, we are indeed bullish of gold, and the trend is clearly still upward. Resistance at the $428-431 level is formidable, and it shall almost certainly be necessary for the EUR to rush upward through 1.2850 (which we view more and more likely) before the upper end of this resistance in spot gold is overcome. It shall be, however, and we shall be patient, awaiting a breakthrough before we add to our already rather sizeable holdings of gold via gold shares. Patience, rather than "im-" is rather necessary therefore.
Finally regarding gold, we note that Prudential has analysed the holdings of gold by various governments around the world. The conclusions drawn are two fold: Firstly, gold holdings by reserve banks have fallen a bit more than 3.0% over the course of the past two years; Secondly, the sellers have been either European or N. American countries, while the buyers have been Asian and S. American. The sellers have been Switzerland, Portugal, the UK, Canada, the Netherlands and Greece; the buyers have been China, Venezuela and Argentina. We are not certain what conclusions we are to draw from this "news," but we'll take some time to consider it. We are open to suggestions.
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