I think this is a good quote from John Hathaway from the Tocqueville Gold Fund
"...Hathaway concluded, "The lesson, which I believe will become evident in six months or so, is that bull market shakeouts are designed to ensure that the fewest number of possible participants will be aboard for the entire ride."
Since the divergence of the stocks to gold in September 2011
Gold price has fallen 15%
Both the HUI and the XGD have both fallen 40%
In a market where the miners index for gold has outperformed the gold price, you would expect in a correction for the reverse to be true.
People make the mistake that QE is teh driver for the Gold price - thats not true. There was NO QE untill 2009... gold price rose on its own strength from 2001 till now.
The easy money crowd speculators drove gold's price higher and caused 2 things
1. Over supply of gold stocks and number of shares in the companies as people scrambled for IPO dollars and funding in general during a credit crisis
2. Over bought situation in the metals
The effect of this correction is three fold
1. Getting rid of the dross (pardon the pun) in the gold mining sector - bankrupt that rubbish
2. Refocusing the managment of gold companies from a scramble to get ounces (which has been sloppy at best), to the scramble to cut costs and improve the economics.
3. Reduces the over supply of spec money to create a real price bottom on the technical chart, and repair the valuation metrix of the metals
The improved fundamentals
1. Nobody is going to stop china, russia and other non western contries and central banks from increasing gold supply either through repatriation, purchase or confiscation
2. Nothing is going to stop western contries from inflating away their own debts and reducing their currency values to inprove trade balances
The risks are
1. Governments trying to redistribute wealth via legal plunder (taxes) which will focus on private wealth
2. The paper manipulation of short term prices
The truth
1. Equity markets are being funded by cheap money
2. Soverign bonds in the US are headed for meltdown
3. The energy required to sustain the growth created by imporving economies is limited in supply at such a cheap price - you cant deliver goods cheaply if petrol is expensive. In Melbounre metro today pretrol is 1.59 per litre of unleaded.... think about that!
Cars, motorbikes, trucks, delivery vans, planes, trains, computer networks, telecommunication networks require commodities.... and there is increasingly limited supply at the current price points in oil, copper, silver, REEs, Uranium, Coal, Zinc, Palladium, Platinum, corn, wheat, protiens.... in the next 12 months you will see beef, lamb and pork increasing in price.
Seriously, just step back and look at the bigger picture