Barrick to eliminate gold hedges

Quote from trefoil:

I can recite gold bug arguments in my sleep.

LOL!!! Most people dream of hot MOTOS (members of the other sex), but not trefoil....no....trefoil dreams of gold bug arguments :D

Just kidding trefoil :D

-gastropod
 
Okay your highness lol. I do agree with some things you said, though.

But I take it as Barrick knowing they better cut their losses because we are coming upon a critical point with the POG. Looks like they no longer want to hedge and see that it is time to go/stay long while the POG is likely to double, triple, or more from this pivotal point. Looks like a good business move to me, and one more sign that the writing is on the wall.

I think the top is in when everybody you know...not necessarily the last of the bears, but the last of the everyday working stiffs that don't know shit about investing or trading have bought toward the end of or right after that last extremely overextended parabolic ride of a bull market.

Seems like right now is more of a time of anticipation. Market participants have been waiting for the leg up above 1035. Most people are not aware of anything that's happening with Gold. They think it's overpriced because it is 150 bucks above it's nominal high, they have no idea what 1000. POG is in 2009 vs. 1980. But they'll learn soon enough.

So just like with the tech bubble and the RE bubble, precious metals will come down hard and fast from stupefying heights, taking down all the suckers that bought at the precipice. IMO we are still at the bottom of the mountain...fundamentally, I don't see how you can say this smacks of toppiness, unless you are a swing trader.

JMO, GLTA

Quote from trefoil:

You have to know a bit about the gold market to understand what I said.
Back in the late nineties, Barrick had a deliberate strategy of putting on hedges to drive down the gold price. They did this in order to bankrupt their competitors. They were widely despised in the gold bug community as a result.
This announcement means they're finally throwing in the towel. A lot of the rise in the gold market is due to gold companies buying in their hedges. Barrick was pretty much the last holdout.
This is decidedly NOT a good sign. I've been trading gold for probably longer than most people here have been alive. I can recite gold bug arguments in my sleep. They've never been right, and they never will be, because they don't understand modern economies.
Anti-gold bugs, OTOH, don't understand the cultural hold gold has.
So, me, I just trade the one against the other. This is an extremely volatile market, and if you play it with an ideological mindset, you WILL get burned.
Fair warning.
 
When stop selling their jewellery for cash (it seems every TV channel has the ads) but rather start buying for investment then you know it is a bull market.
 
Quote from gastropod:

LOL!!! Most people dream of hot MOTOS (members of the other sex), but not trefoil....no....trefoil dreams of gold bug arguments :D

Just kidding trefoil :D

-gastropod

...in between dreaming of getting in in between, of course. :cool:
 
As usual, John Dizard got it right:

Is time being called on gold’s bull run?

By John Dizard

Published: September 13 2009 09:50 | Last updated: September 13 2009 09:50


The gold world knows a bell was rung last week by mining group Barrick Gold’s announcement that it will unwind the rest of its hedge book (ie gold sold for future delivery, which partially offsets any price declines). The question is whether the bell signified the beginning of the end for the bull market, or its breakthrough to higher levels.
For its part, Barrick, in its press release announcing the massive de-hedging, made all the right bullish noises about “an increasingly positive outlook on the gold price”, which suggests that hedging would be a waste of money, and “continuing robust gold supply/demand fundamentals”.
For years, gold bulls and conspiracy theorists had excoriated Barrick’s forward gold sales as a lid on the metal’s price and a deviation from the true faith. And, indeed, as gold’s price rises, hedge books cost money...
However, that is not necessarily the whole story. While no doubt the company subscribes to the reasoning in the press releases, there are a few more moving parts here, possibly not mentioned in the release so as to conserve space and preserve simplicity. The Barrick hedge unwind may be partly a delayed consequence of the credit crisis.
Over-the-counter swaps, such as those generated by the company’s gold sales contracts, were a pretty profitable business for banks in the years just gone by. The OTC swaps have a way of ballooning balance sheets, with huge obligations offset by huge assets. Particularly given the nice fees on this bell and that whistle, that wasn’t a problem in a world where risk-weighting was a matter for the banks’ own judgment. In this new world, where OTC swaps are officially a Bad Thing, and where balance sheet shrinkage is the order of the day, the whole business is less attractive. Not that Barrick couldn’t continue to finance the forward book, but it could well have been on notice that the price of doing so would be much higher.
Also, there was a simultaneous announcement by Barrick that it would be selling 25 per cent of the annual production of its Pascua-Lama silver mine, which opens in 2012, for a total of $625m to Silver Wheaton Corp, with $212m of that paid upfront. The price will be the lesser of market or $3.90, indexed for inflation. On the surface, selling silver at such a huge discount to the present market price of over $16 would appear to contradict the company’s announced bullishness on precious metals.
Almost as if some banker wanted that cash back right now, never mind the future.

In the financial markets, those of us who've been around the block a few times know, things aren't always what they seem.
 
Look guys -- all the gold-loving dipshits that write bad things about Barrick are missing one big thing -- they are *not* speculating in the price of gold, upwards or downwards by selling contracts into the future. They were hedging the output of their mines, to lower their financing costs to that of a non-cylical company.

Obviously it worked fairly well, as Barrick is the largest producer of gold in the world, and has been able to swallow up an enormous number of other players in the industry with their superior balance sheet.

Barrick is *not*, and was not engaged in a conspiracy to lower the price of gold by shorting contracts. They were doing what every mining company rationally does in the market -- sells their production. The shorted contracts were backed by physical production of gold, so the non-cyclical income of the firm was not at risk. Barrick also had, and continues to have a robust upside and robust leverage to gold, if, at some point, the price of gold goes up substantially (relative to production costs).

I'm personally getting a little sick of reading about all the goldbugs railing against Barrick every chance they get, even though Barrick would be *nothing* without the hedging strategies that they've used over the years to get large. And the cost of exiting the hedges has not been very onerous in the whole scheme of things. And even if gold skyrocketed to $5000 tomorrow -- Barrick would still do extremely well. Maybe not as well as a high-cost gold producing firm that is extremely leveraged to the price of gold -- but most certainly, better than going bankrupt like all of those high-cost producers went in the 80s and 90s.

I mean, think of it like this -- PG makes tampons and razors (among other things). Do they hoard their tampons and razors in warehouses, hoping the price goes up? No. They sell their production to customers based on short and long-term contracts. What's so 'wrong' with a gold mining company doing this? Nobody runs around like a ranting lunatic accusing PG of trying to distort the price of razors and tampons. Why would the goldbug looney's do the same about Barrick and gold?
 
Good post. Business is business, and it's all about making that buck, regardless of whether you're selling widgets at 10 cents a pop or gold at several orders of magnitude higher per pop.
 
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