Daily Close | Forex, Metals, Oil, Agriculture December 31, 2020

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Agriculture

After last year’s extremely low 270 million US corn exports, overseas demand & shipments have rebounded. Overall, this year’s Dec 1 corn stocks are likely at 11.91 billion bu., up 583 million from 2019, but lower than the 3 previous years’ stocks. However, the higher weight of the animals and the reduced available supply of sorghum and DDGs (ethanol by-product) suggest more corn was fed. US corn shipments are expected to be 445 million bu. In the overnight electronic session, the March corn is currently trading at 480 which is 5 ½ cents higher.
Ritual Coffee Roasters is one of the many food and beverage brands taking note of changing consumer behavior during the pandemic. With soybean shipments seasonally declining, this pace is possible, but it needs to begin shortly.

Metals

These cover the operating costs necessary to run physically-backed gold ETFs, including paying people and vaulting varying gold bullion depending on demand. So the only way these ETFs can maintain price parity with gold is to shunt excess gold-ETF-share supply and demand directly into gold itself. Before that pioneering gold ETF, diversifying into gold required directly buying physical coins which unfortunately often proved expensive, inefficient, and cumbersome.
The collective capital flows through gold ETFs are responsible for ever-more of gold’s price action. Together they commanded 46.0% of all the gold bullion held by all the world’s gold ETFs at the end of Q3’20! Return to text One of gold’s primary drivers is American stock-market capital sloshing into and out of gold through major exchange-traded funds. When gold-ETF-share demand exceeds gold’s, those share prices will decouple from gold’s to the upside. Gold’s largest and most-popular exchange-traded funds are increasingly coming to dominate gold price trends.
The best available data on global gold supply-and-demand trends is published quarterly by the venerable World Gold Council. Gold ETFs’ mission is to track and mirror the underlying gold price. They are of course the GLD SPDR Gold Shares and IAU iShares Gold Trust. That requires making these ETFs actual conduits for stock-market capital to flow into and out of real physical gold bullion. Gold’s next upleg depends on those capital flows reversing to buying, accelerating its gains.
With this overtaking showing no signs of abating, analyzing stock-market capital flows into gold ETFs now requires looking at GLD and IAU together instead of just GLD. As the last quarter ended, GLD held 1,268.9 metric tons of physical gold bullion in trust for its shareholders. Stock traders use these gold-ETF shares to instantly gain or shed gold exposure in their portfolios. Then they immediately plow the proceeds from those new-share sales into buying more physical gold bullion for their vaults.
Cheap and easy to trade, they act as direct conduits for the vast pools of stock-market capital to access gold. For example, when gold’s last secular bull peaked way back in August 2011, IAU’s gold-bullion holdings ran just 13.1% of GLD’s. Its outstanding Gold Demand Trends reports are essential reading for all traders interested in the precious-metals realm.

United States

Quite the feat, considering the wild amount of volatility Wall Street saw for most of 2020. is seeing an uptick in activity in its options pits today. This news made HOTH one of the best performers on the Nasdaq today, last seen up 50.3% at $2.47. Today, Wall Street continues to use Zacks research including the Zacks Rank and Zacks Equity Research, which combines the best of quantitative and qualitative analysis. Although valuations of many of the darlings of Wall Street look frothy, we believe investors will continue to put their trust and capital into well-run technology names.
The NY Fed’s Q4 GDP growth forecast from last Friday fell 40 basis points to 1.96%.
Research from our team of in-house analysts has been quoted by The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, MarketWatch, USA Today, Kitco, Reuters, US News & World Report, CNBC, and more. As of December 23rd, the Atlanta Fed GDP Nowcast showed Q4 GDP growth on pace to be 10.4% which was down from 11.1%. The NY Fed’s Q4 GDP Nowcast is dramatically different from the Atlanta Fed’s model. Unheard of in the days when all Wall Street could say was “Buy”.

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