Gold & Silver Trading Alert: Pause or Bottom? #2

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Briefly: In our opinion, long (full) speculative positions in gold, silver and mining stocks are justified from the risk/reward point of view.

Once again nothing changed in the precious metals market yesterday, so there's little to comment on. Today's $10 pre-market decline doesn't change much. Because of that, we will quote yesterday's alert as it is still very much up to date:

The precious metals market hasn’t rallied so far this week, but in light of the recent decline, even the lack of fresh lows is very encouraging… or is it? Are we just seeing a pause and the decline that will follow will be as significant and as volatile as the one that preceded it or are we seeing a bottoming process?

In short, nothing changed based on yesterday’s price/volume action and what we wrote yesterday and on the previous days, remains up-to-date (and consequently, today’s alert will be quite short).

Our reply to the above question is that it’s likely a bottoming process but it’s not the final bottom – it’s just a local one. The precious metals market barely moved yesterday, but the implications are bullish as there was nothing to invalidate the important action that we had seen on Friday. The major reversal on strong volume is something that makes us look for higher prices in the near term, even though we think that the medium-term trend still remains down and that the final bottom has not yet been formed.

With no changes in the outlook, we will summarize today’s alert in the same way as we’ve summarized the previous one:

Summing up, while it doesn’t seem that the final bottom for the precious metals sector is in, it seems that a local one is and we are adjusting our trading position accordingly. Based on the silver’s decline and reaching the $14.33 level on Friday, we closed our short position and took massive profits off the table (even if we don’t take any leverage into account). We had entered this short position on March 30 when (previous trading day’s closing prices) gold was at $1,198.30 (over $120 higher than the price at which we exited the short position), silver was at $16.97 (over $2.60 over the price at which we exited the short position), and the HUI was at 166.22 (over 58 index points – more than 53% - over the price at which we exited the short position).

We wrote that the action that we would take after exiting the short positions (opening a long position vs. staying on the sidelines) would depend on the kind of signals that we got and we got strongly bullish signals for the short term. Consequently, we are opening full speculative long position in gold, silver and mining stocks. If the short position has not yet been exited, it seems that exiting it as soon as possible and securing profits (and opening the mentioned long position) is justified from the risk/reward perspective.

We are not making any adjustments to the long-term investment capital.

On a side note, if you’re not familiar with the way we choose individual gold stocks and silver stocks, we suggest that you become familiar with our tools: Golden StockPicker and Silver StockPicker – these are the tools that we will utilize to select miners to buy when getting back on the long side of the market, as they have greatly enhanced the performance of the simple buy-and-hold approach. They can be used for speculative trades as well and at this time they favor IAMGOLD Corporation and Randgold Resources as far as gold stocks are concerned and First Majestic Silver Corporation and Silver Wheaton Corporation as far as silver stocks are concerned.

We will keep you – our subscribers – updated.

To summarize:

Trading capital (our opinion): Long position (full) position in gold, silver and mining stocks is justified from the risk/reward perspective with the following stop-loss orders and initial (! – this means that reaching them doesn’t automatically close the position) target prices:

Gold: initial target price: $1,130; stop-loss: $1,063, initial target price for the UGLD ETN: $9.24; stop loss for the UGLD ETN $7.69
Silver: initial target price: $15.20; stop-loss: $14.12, initial target price for the USLV ETN: $14.40; stop loss for USLV ETN $11.51
Mining stocks (price levels for the GDX ETN): initial target price: $15.87; stop-loss: $12.77, initial target price for the NUGT ETN: $5.17; stop loss for the NUGT ETN $2.70

In case one wants to bet on junior mining stocks' prices (we do not suggest doing so – we think senior mining stocks are more predictable in case of short-term trades – we if one wants to do it anyway, we provide the details), here are the stop-loss details and initial target prices:

GDXJ: initial target price: $21.78; stop-loss: $17.67
JNUG: initial target price: $12.01; stop-loss: $6.39

Long-term capital (our opinion): No positions

Insurance capital (our opinion): Full position

Please note that a full position doesn’t mean using all of the capital for a given trade. You will find details on our thoughts on gold portfolio structuring in the Key Insights section on our website.

As a reminder – “initial target price” means exactly that – an “initial” one, it’s not a price level at which we suggest closing positions. If this becomes the case (like it did in the previous trade) we will refer to these levels as levels of exit orders (exactly as we’ve done previously). Stop-loss levels, however, are naturally not “initial”, but something that, in our opinion, might be entered as an order.

Since it is impossible to synchronize target prices and stop-loss levels for all the ETFs and ETNs with the main markets that we provide these levels for (gold, silver and mining stocks – the GDX ETF), the stop-loss levels and target prices for other ETNs and ETF (among other: UGLD, DGLD, USLV, DSLV, NUGT, DUST, JNUG, JDST) are provided as supplementary, and not as “final”. This means that if a stop-loss or a target level is reached for any of the “additional instruments” (DGLD for instance), but not for the “main instrument” (gold in this case), we will view positions in both gold and DGLD as still open and the stop-loss for DGLD would have to be moved lower. On the other hand, if gold moves to a stop-loss level but DGLD doesn’t, then we will view both positions (in gold and DGLD) as closed. In other words, since it’s not possible to be 100% certain that each related instrument moves to a given level when the underlying instrument does, we can’t provide levels that would be binding. The levels that we do provide are our best estimate of the levels that will correspond to the levels in the underlying assets, but it will be the underlying assets that one will need to focus on regarding the sings pointing to closing a given position or keeping it open. We might adjust the levels in the “additional instruments” without adjusting the levels in the “main instruments”, which will simply mean that we have improved our estimation of these levels, not that we changed our outlook on the markets. We are already working on a tool that would update these levels on a daily basis for the most popular ETFs, ETNs and individual mining stocks.

Our preferred ways to invest in and to trade gold along with the reasoning can be found in the how to buy gold section. Additionally, our preferred ETFs and ETNs can be found in our Gold & Silver ETF Ranking.

As always, we'll keep you - our subscribers - updated should our views on the market change. We will continue to send out Gold & Silver Trading Alerts on each trading day and we will send additional Alerts whenever appropriate.

The trading position presented above is the netted version of positions based on subjective signals (opinion) from your Editor, and the Tools and Indicators.

As a reminder, Gold & Silver Trading Alerts are posted before or on each trading day (we usually post them before the opening bell, but we don't promise doing that each day). If there's anything urgent, we will send you an additional small alert before posting the main one.

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