Wednesday 16 July 2014

Equities vs Gold: Your Choice Made Simple

As a general dilemma, it is difficult to forecast the future. A few weeks ago, forecasters predicted that Brazil would win the World Cup, and as a matter of fact they badly lost against Germany. In recent weeks it has been easy to find bullish comments related to gold based on inflation worries, European banking risk, and Iraq. The question now is, should we consider gold over stocks?

Since the past two days (14-15/07/14) gold declined approximately 36.64% and 21.60% correspondingly, accounting record volumes traded. Its biggest decline in almost seven months as Portuguese banking concerns eased, Israel ceased fire, equities advanced and dollar strengthened. The Fed suggested an improving US economy and the fact that they might hike rates in 2015, which is sooner than expected. Meanwhile, The S&P’s 500 jumped up after Citigroup, JP Morgan, Well Fargo and Goldman Sachs reported profit that exceeded analysts' estimates.

As seen in the chart below, investors have favoured stocks relative to gold.



Bearish Outlook for India’s Demand for Gold

India is considered to be one of the biggest consumers of gold, but we believe physical demand will remain short. Important to note, that the country has decided to maintain a 10% import duty on gold and silver, which will further have a dampening effect on future gold demand expectations. Also, with a monsoon season coming up indicates a low average gold demand from India.

Besides, last week’s European driven pullback in stocks, the longer-term outlook for equities is still favourable. Fed is likely to maintain low interest rate to revive inflation. Thus, US equities will continue to rally. The S&P 500 has been hitting records on expectation that the Fed has no incentive to end its ultra-loose policies. In fact, it is more prone to wait until inflation picks up and the housing market recovers sufficiently, the same goes with the labour market

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