Just as we start to observe some asset outflows in the largest Gold tracking ETF GLD (SPDR Gold Trust, Expense Ratio 0.40%) on massive weakness recently in the underlying commodity, the fund is up in the early going today on largely global equity weakness as well as a notable move down in the U.S. Dollar.
GLD has seen more than $500 million vacate the fund in recent sessions but in the context of the fund’s $30.2 billion asset base these are still quite small flows. Gold and all precious metals really, Silver, Platinum, and Palladium included have been hammered recently on broad metals and commodity weakness, in tandem with mostly a rising U.S. Dollar, not including today.
Punished along with the metals themselves has been the miners, which has disappointed more than a handful of early 2014 bulls who previously enjoyed a nice ride in the segment up until recently. Whereas year to date GLD has seen about $809 million flow out of the fund, the largest “Miners” ETF in the U.S. landscape, GDX (Market Vectors Gold Miners, Expense Ratio 0.53%) has seen about $350 million leave the doors via redemptions.
GDX is actually up today for the first time in the past five trading sessions, after trading at a fresh low since early June right around these levels. GDX has exhibited notable short term volatility on several occasions in 2014, generally with extreme weakness being met with sudden upside bias so we will have to see how the current scenario plays out in the short term.
GDXJ (Market Vectors Junior Gold Miners, Expense Ratio 0.57%) impressively has pulled in $1.1 billion year to date, making it a $2.3 billion name, and impressively is the fourth largest ETF in the entire “Commodity Producers Equity” category in terms of asset size.
There always has been a notable demand for the Miners it seems, among not only short term traders but longer term investors whom like to pick spots. Two ETFs that tend to explode in short term popularity on such moves in the Miners are the daily oriented, triple leveraged long and short Gold Miners ETFs from Direxion, NUGT (Direxion Daily Gold Miners Bull 3X, Expense Ratio 0.95%) and DUST (Direxion Daily Gold Miners Bear 3X, Expense Ratio 0.95%). In the month of September, NUGT has seen more than $275 million flow into the fund despite the path of Miners stocks themselves largely being a negative one, while DUST has seen more than $138 million vacate the ETF via redemptions.