Tuesday, April 2, 2013

2/4/2013: US Mint gold sales: Q1 2013

Q1 2013 data for gold coins sales by US Mint is out and is worth a look. Here are some top trends:


Per chart above, number of US Mint coins sold in March 2013 declined to 103,000 compared to 155,000 in February. Controlling somewhat for seasonal changes, y/y number of coins sold rose 3.52% from 99,500 in sales in March 2012. Looking at Q1 totals, Q1 2013 sales added to 533,500 coins, up 39.3% on Q1 2012, 10.57% on Q1 2011 and 96.86% on Q1 2010. Healthy uplifts against generally flat-trend prices. And, crucially, coins sales do not appear to be tracking 'risk-on' and 'risk-off' signals from equity markets. As I always maintained, coins sales have much more to do with steady risk-averse savers than with speculative buyers.

Chart below details relationship between volumes of gold sold via US Mint coins and price of gold (monthly final). In terms of volumes sold, March 2013 clocked sales of 62,000 oz, down from 80,500 in February 2013, and down 0.8% on March 2012 (62,500 oz). In quarterly totals, Q1 2013 came in at 292,500 oz and this was up 38.95% on Q1 2012, down 2.34% on Q1 2011 and up 7.93% on Q1 2010. In other words, much steadier demand growth in volumes of sales was also broken in 2013.

Meanwhile, price of gold rose 1.21% m/m in March and slipped 3.29% y/y. (More on correlations below).


The following chart details trend in average gold content per coin sold (oz/coin): in March 2013, average gold content stood at 0.602 oz/coin, up on 0.519 oz/coin in February 2013 and not far off from the 0.628 oz/coin in March 2012. However, overall trend remains relatively flat at around 0.65 oz/coin since mid-2006. Longer term trend is gently upward, indicating that over time, investors and savers started to allocated slightly more of their investable savings into coinage gold.


 Chart below shows correlation between volumes of coinage gold sold and gold price:


Two things worth noting in the above:

  1. Since approximately Q2 2012 we are experiencing steady upward momentum in 12 months rolling correlations, and these are rising toward +0.5. This trend was confirmed in March 2013 and it is consistent with 24mo rolling correlations, but is still far off on 36mo or 50mo rolling basis.
  2. Linear long-term trend is also upward and is now in the positive correlation territory. This can potentially suggest that gradual financialisation of the gold markets in general is having a long term impact on gold's shorter-range hedging properties, since positive correlation is consistent with higher propensity of 'buy-on-dips' and 'book profit' behaviour. However, as 60mo chart shows below, we are still in solid hedging territory for now when it comes to longer investment horizons. Furthermore, correlations trends are negligible in size. So something to watch in the future and to blog on next... stay tuned.
Chart with 60mo rolling correlations



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