Of market woes and gold's demise...partial release ..

TGR: Doug Casey’s latest missive rounded it up to 30% too.

FH: The significance here is that the institutional side is getting on board with gold. That’s a big deal.

TGR: Because the gold market is so small compared to the market caps these institutions deal with, even a small change in percentage would make a huge difference.

FH: All the brokers are getting their marching orders simultaneously. What happens is that non-correlated assets begin to correlate as people seek liquidity. So everyone’s saying, “I have to get cash.” It’s important to remember that brokers were leveraged 20 times and low-income house buyers were leveraged 99 times. This creates a chain reaction and knocks down the commodities. Several of these hedge funds have blown up, and if our holdings are similar to theirs, they’ve hurt us.

We went into this correction with a big cash position back in June, and we never expected such a huge correction, but our models were showing that it should be 20% to 25% cash. Then we start to nibble as things get clobbered, but they continue to get clobbered.

TGR: Yes.

FH: Last week the markets hammered every stock with liquidity. Many funds have been hit by this problem. Margin calls are driving this. It has nothing to do with the demand for gold or the supply and discoveries.

TGR: But that should work itself out fairly quickly by the end of the year.

FH: It was estimated that by the end of the year there would be $22 billion of resource stocks coming out.

TGR: Do you mean coming out of the hedge funds?

FH: Yes. Hedge funds have been forced to shut down. It’s really interesting to look at the TSE Venture Index. When the asset-backed paper problems happened last summer, retail sponsorship dropped dramatically. The U. S. went through something similar in February when suddenly the small caps and mid-caps started losing liquidity. What we noticed was that the auction rate paper is exactly ten times the size of Canada’s asset build paper crisis—$330 billion versus $33 billion. It was just before tax season, so a lot of American investors had to scramble for cash by redeeming their equity funds to pay their taxes.

Full release..well worth reading..

http://www.commodityonline.com/news/...