What goes up must come down has been the short term theme for the Gold Miners as of late, with leading ETF GDX (Market Vectors Gold Miners, Expense Ratio 0.52%) rallying from the $25 level as high as $28.64 only to trade back with a $25 handle today inside of four trading sessions.
Despite the price gyrations, GDX has net attracted about $1.3 billion in new assets via creation activity in recent days, and the fund now has an impressive asset base of about $7.7 billion, according to manager Market Vectors, a unit of Van Eck Global.
GDXJ (Market Vectors Junior Gold Miners, Expense Ratio 0.54%) is smaller in size with $1.3 billion in AUM and focusing as its name suggests on small-cap Miners, and this fund has raised an impressive $274 million year to date as well.
NUGT (Direxion Daily Gold Miners Bull 3X Shares, Expense Ratio 0.95%) and DUST (Direxion Daily Gold Miners Bear 3X Shares, Expense Ratio 0.95%) have simply become incredibly popular trading tools with an explosion of volume lately (several 5-10 million share days recently) and these funds track the same index as GDX does, just on daily leveraged three times long and short bases. [Junior Gold Miner ETF Lagging Large-Cap Peer]
RING (iShares MSCI Global Gold Miners, Expense Ratio 0.39%) also has seen a pick-up in activity in sympathy with the sector here with the fund trading nearly 500,000 shares last Friday alone (ADV is 84k shares). One thing remains clear, despite short term price volatility and at times whipsaw technical moves, ETFs that track the Gold and Precious Metal Miners remain very popular among institutional portfolio managers and traders as well as in corners of retail.