One of the stranger speculations this week has been Apple rescuing the world's gold industry. Its new gold smartwatch, the Watch Edition, due out in April, will have an 18-carat gold case. It'll set back aspirant Chinese Yuppies (Chuppies?) USD10-17,000. Analysts have had to guess gold content, but assuming unit sales of 1mn per month (that's 12mn watches a year), Apple's gold watch could suck up a third of the world's gold production (700+ tons). This would make it the third-largest gold consumer in the world after China and India. Incidentally, at a time when all the bear talk is of US "bubbles", UBS thinks Apple is on a PER of 12.4x for September 2016, with a yield of 1.8%. +1.8% sure beats the yield on gold, which at my Swiss bank has a minus handle. 

David Fuller's view

Apple has introduced some new demand for gold and the Fed may have even helped bullion’s USD price even more by stealthily intervening to cap the Dollar Index’s rally at 100.39 on 13^th March.  Short sellers of gold futures and just about every other traded commodity may need some further convincing but if the greenback’s rally is largely over for the next several months, then the Continuous Commodity Index should be in the region of at least a medium-term trough. 

Iain Little will be featuring more interesting investment trusts (closed-end funds) at our next Markets Now meeting on Monday 20^th April (see his comments in GTI above).