Uranium: Time "U" move?
Thanks to a subscriber for this report from Canaccord Genuity which may be of interest. Here is a section:
David Fuller and Eoin Treacy's Comment of the Day
Category - Precious Metals / Commodities
Eoin's personal portfolio August 10th 2018
A tiny tweak to sugar is about to make the world's sweets a lot healthier
This article by Chase Purdy for Quartz may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:
In order to enjoy the sensation of sweetness, sugar molecules have to land on our sweet-tasting receptors, most of which sit on the tip of the tongue. But sugar is notoriously bad at actually hitting those receptors, so bad that only 20% actually makes it, the rest washing down our gullets and into the digestive system. This is one reason why many foods contain so much sugar. It’s also why a lot of food companies, in spite of their efforts, have found it difficult—even impossible—to reduce the amount of added sugar in their products while also maintaining the tastes people expect.
But a relatively new startup headquartered near Tel Aviv, Israel has developed a super-tiny method that may have cracked what has been an impossible code. In doing so, it sits on the cusp of changing the landscape of food manufacturing by making sugar so efficient that food companies can use 40% less while keeping tastes the same.
China trip report July 2018
This is usually a good month to buy gold but it's a tough call this year
Thanks to Niru Devani for this article on Gold.
Gold broke down below a key technical support level of 1236 which was the low in December 2016. The trigger was the yield on the three month Treasury Bill which broke through 2%, a level not seen since the summer of 2008. This followed the Fed chairman's testimony on Capitol Hill to reiterate that the Fed remains on track to continue to raising interest rates. In an environment of a rallying U.S. dollar and still positive real interest rates, gold does not prosper.
I thought the article below, by Dominic Frisby at Moneyweek.com, would be of interest to other subscribers as it offers a contrarian point of view.
Summertime, and the gold investing ain’t easy
Wisdom has it that the summer months – June, July and August – are the best time of year to buy precious metals (and their related stocks) with a view to offloading the following winter or in early spring.
It’s one of those trades that seems to work better in the rear-view mirror than it does in real time, however.
If you look back at a chart of gold you can usually find a low sometime in July, and then find a point between the following October and April, where the gold price was 10% or 20% higher, and then declare that the trade worked.
Buying the low and selling the high in real time is a rather trickier proposition. That said, it is do-able.
However, gold itself is currently in freefall. In April, gold was re-testing five-year highs at $1,360-$1,370 per ounce. There was a nice uptrend in place. Each low was higher than the last. Talk of inflation was doing the rounds again, and the solution was shiny, yellow-y metal.
Now it is some $130 lower at $1,227. Each low is lower than the last. Every attempt at a rally is anaemic. The trend is strong and the trend is down. To be buying now and attempting to play the “summer trade” is to try and catch a falling knife. Sometimes it works and the audience applauds – however the risk of self-injury is high.
Tuesday was particularly brutal. Gold’s enemy number one, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, Jerome Powell, said that the economy was growing at a “solid pace”, that the unemployment rate was expected to fall further, that the recent pickup in inflation, toward the Fed’s 2% target, was “encouraging”.
The Fed has already raised interest rates twice this year and Powell pencilled in two more quarter-point moves. Stocks duly rallied (a bit), the dollar rallied – and gold took a $20 wallop in the face, sending it to two-year lows.
Long-term themes review July 17th 2018
Long-term themes review June 22nd 2018
Goldman Says Market Melancholy Is Recipe for Big Earnings Season
This article by Sarah Ponczek for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:
Relax, says Goldman Sachs -- enough has changed that a replay is unlikely. Bulls should take heart, says David Kostin, the firm’s chief U.S. equity strategist, because whatever euphoria infected markets in the first part of the year has long ago dissipated. Hedge fund clients who were aggressively positioned heading into April are more conservative now, with exposures sitting near the bottom of their 12-month range.
“Going into Q1 earnings season, it was peak optimism,” Jeff Schulze, an investment strategist at ClearBridge Investments in New York, said by phone. “Now you have exactly the opposite situation where that optimism has been converted to pessimism.
As long as companies can hit those estimates, I think the market will reward those, rather than punishing them.”
Fundamentally, the second quarter will look a lot like the first as far as results go. S&P 500 companies are forecast to report 20 percent growth from a year ago and sales are likely to rise 8 percent, mirroring the previous period, which was the best since 2011.
Shipowners on Pace to Scrap $1 Billion in Oil Tankers This Year
This article by Costas Paris for the Wall Street Journal may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:
Some 1,000 vessels are broken up every year and their steel and other metals are melted or simply stacked up and sold to factories. The yards in the Indian subcontinent recycle around 80% of all ships, with the remainder going to China and Turkey, although Beijing has said it will suspend scrapping starting next year.
The average age of VLCCs going to scrap this year is 18.8 years, the youngest since 2013, according to VesselsValue. A ship’s average operational age is around 25 years, but after 15 years in the water, the vessel has to go through an extensive survey to determine if it is seaworthy. “An average survey costs about $2 million, and you have to do it again at 20 years, so a number of owners opt to scrap instead,” Mr. Sharma said.
The oil glut is also sending offshore rigs to scrapyards. It is a relatively new business that has boomed over the past five years, as the cost of drilling at sea is much higher than inland exploration. At least 18 rigs have been broken up so far this year, compared with 46 last year, according to GMS.
Email of the day on the marginal cost of production for silver:
The average marginal cost of production for gold is currently about USD1,000 per troy ounce. What is it for silver? And its also per troy ounce? Thanks in advance.