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Myles Udland December 1, 2014 Gold is exploding higher. In afternoon trade on Monday, gold futures were up better than 3.5% in the last 24 hours to around $1,215 an ounce, moving back above $1,200 for the first time in more than a week. The spike in gold reverses a plunge in gold late last week that was continued on Sunday night as the futures market re-opened after voters in Switzerland rejected a measure that would have required the Swiss National Bank to increase its gold holdings from 8% to 20%. Oil, which also got crushed last week, is also...

Tyler Durden 12/01/2014After last night's big flush across commodities, they have rallied notably. Gold is now up over $50 from those lows, with Silver, copper, and even crude bouncing hard (after testing below $64 overnight). The USD is notably weaker, stocks lower, and bond yields testing mid-October flash-crash Bullard lows...(snip)

Myles Udland November 30, 2014More than 50% lower. That is how far Canadian billionaire Murray Edwards, chairman of Canadian Natural Resource, thinks oil prices can fall from here. Speaking with Canadian business publication Financial Post, Edwards said, "Prices could spike down to $30, $40. It got down to $35 in 2008, for a very short period of time." Edwards told Financial Post's Claudia Cattaneo that, "On a given day you can have market fluctuations where prices fluctuate far more than the underlying economic value of the unit," adding that if oil falls to $30 or $40 a barrel he doesn't...

Myles Udland November 27, 2014Crude oil just broke $70 for the first time since June 2010. West Texas Intermediate crude futures are below $70 after Thursday's OPEC meeting resulted in the oil cartel announcing that it will not cut production. On Thursday, WTI futures were down as low as $68.90, a more than 6% decline in the last 24 hours following the news. (snip)

Rise of protectionism in China a threat to commodities imports By Fayen Wong SHANGHAI Fri Nov 14, 2014 1:12pm EST (Reuters) - As China lobbies world leaders to back its free trade plan at an Asia-Pacific summit this week, businesses are complaining about Beijing's use of non-tariff barriers from customs clearance to quality restrictions to curb raw material imports. Amid a slowdown in economic growth, the world's top commodities buyer is facing a supply glut that has sent local prices tumbling and miners deep into the red. Inventories of iron ore, coal and cotton are bulging at ports across the...

Tyler Durden11/05/2014 When it comes to buyers of physical assets as opposed to traders of paper representations of such assets, there is one key difference: the latter, more than anything, enjoy looking at "heatmaps", chasing trends and jumping on momentum, the result being the most recent massive selloff in such "paper" representations of precious metals as the GLD and SLV ETFs, and various gold futures. On the other hand, those who prefer to hold the metal in their hands, as well as others such as China whose ravenous apetite for gold over the past 4 years has been extensively covered...

Elena Holodny November 5, 2014 Gold is getting crushed. Again. The yellow metal is at $1,140 per ounce, down by about 2.3%. It got as low as $1,137. This is the lowest level since April 2010. Gold has been dropping to new lows for several weeks as the dollar has strengthened. Oil is another commodity that is tumbling again. WTI crude oil prices dropped as low as $75.84 per barrel shortly after 5 a.m. ET. Brent crude touched $81.63. While this is great for consumers, this is troubling for the oil producers, who may be forced to idle unprofitable projects....

Tyler Durden October 30, 2014 US shale oil is now the marginal swing barrel in the new world oil order, and as Goldman Sachs warns (despite Larry Kudlow apparently knowing better), a decline in WTI to $75/bbl would start to significantly slow US shale growth (and thus employment, capex, and the entire US economy). Via Goldman Sachs, Our oil forecast calls for a slowdown in US shale oil production which our North American Energy equity research team led by Brian Singer estimates will occur at $75/bbl WTI prices. They estimate that the WTI oil price at which average wells in...

Tyler Durden 10/25/2014 18 months ago we first brought the world's attention to the end of what has now been exposed as among the largest ponzi schemes in history - the Chinese Commodity Financing Deals (CCFDs) - pointing out how this meant commodities like copper were likely to come under pressure as firms liquidate what minimal holdings they had (and sell out futures hedges) to manage the risk of unwinds in these quasi-collateralized deals. Since then, copper prices have indeed plunged, as has global growth expectations and global bond yields as a realization that 'demand' implied by previous prices was...

Akin Oyedele October 22, 2014"Gold gets dug out of the ground in Africa or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head." That's what Warren Buffett said back in 1998. Gold has long been considered a safe-haven investment. However, the price of gold has performed dismally in recent years. For those who don't trust the conventional financial markets, there are alternative more unorthodox ways to put away wealth. We put together a list of some...

Joe WeisenthalOctober 10, 2014 The global market plunge continues. On Thursday we saw the Dow give up more than 300 points, and markets again awash in a sea of red. France is down 1.6%. German shares are down over 2%. Hong Kong's Hang Seng fell nearly 2%, while Japan lost just over 1%. US futures are all lower, by just under 1%.(snip)

Tyler Durden 10/06/2014 Following Friday's post-payrolls exuberance, the US Dollar crashed by the most in over a year today and stocks retraced most of their gains with only European data (weak) to base any momentum ignition on. Today's stock weakness turning point coincided with the bankruptcy headlines of GTAT but the divergence to USDJPY and bonds set the scene for stocks' demise. Trannies were today's laggard (after leading Friday) along with small-caps as The Dow clung to 17,000 and S&P closed marginally red. EUR strength led USD weaker and the plunge accelerated into the US close (eradicating all payrolls gains)....

   October 5, 2014Joe Weisenthal There goes gold. As markets whirr back to life to start the week, gold is falling again. (snip)

Buying Time.

Akin Oyedele September 19, 2014 On Friday, Silver fell more than 3% to less than $18 an ounce, its lowest level in more than four years.Silver - FinViz The price of gold also fell about 0.8% and touched its lowest level since January. Gold has been weak recently and is approaching a four-year low. Gold - FinViz Platinum also fell to a nine-month low.(snip)

Tyler Durden 06/30/2014 Copper has rallied almost 6% in the last few weeks with a 1.25% surge today sending the 'economic' metal back to near 4-month highs. This must means demand is picking up, right? This must mean the world is ok, right? Chatter is that this morning's home sales 'noise' surprise spike was the catalyst but it appears much more likely that a combination of a continued squeeze of a very-extended spec short position and the ongoing unwind of China's commodity-finance-deals is the real catalyst. As the market comes to terms with synthetic demand (CCFD unwinds buying back hedges)...

Tyler Durden 06/06/2014 Two years ago, stories of fake tungsten-filled gold coins and bars began to spread; it appears, between the shortage of physical gold (after Asian central bank buying) and the increase in smuggling (courtesy of India's controls among others) that gold fraud is back on the rise. As SCMP reports, a mainland China businessman, Zhao Jingjun, discovered that HK$270 million of 998kg of gold bars he bought in Ghana had been swapped for non-precious metal bars. What is perhaps even more worrisome, given the probe into commodity-financing deals and the rehypothecation evaporation; these gold bars were shipped to...

May 28, 2014 - 06:02 PMInvestment_U Back in January, I wrote a column explaining the supply-demand squeeze in nickel. One way I suggested to play the nickel squeeze, the iPath Dow Jones-AIG Nickel Total Return Sub-Index ETN (NYSE: JJN), is up 38% from my recommendation. Did you buy that fund? Well, if you didn't, there's no need to kick yourself. The nickel run isn't over. In fact, if anything, the supply/demand squeeze powering nickel's surge is likely to get stronger. The biggest user of nickel is China. Nickel is used to make stainless steel, and China makes a lot of...

May 27, 2014 - 02:40 PM Ned W Schmidt Agri-Commodities Prices Winning - Or, how long does it take the Street to identify an elephant in the room? Apparently the answer to that question is a time period longer than should be the case. Agri-Food prices have been rising fairly dramatically thus far this year. With an average gain of about 10% since the beginning of the year, eating is becoming far more expensive. Rather than a short-term phenomenon, higher prices for Agri-Foods over time are part of the future, an unavoidable one. Prices rise for Agri-Foods when demand grows...

With JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank having exited the commodities business (and numerous other banks discussing it ahead of the Fed and regulators' decisions over banking rules of ownership), it appears a few short months of regulatory scrutiny is enough to warrant more broad-based cuts across bulge-bracket banks historically most manipulated and profitable business units. As The FT reports, Barclays, one of the world’s biggest commodities traders, is planning to exit large parts of its metals, agricultural and energy business in a move expected to be announced this week. This comes on the heels of Barclays shuttering its power-trading operations...