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Posted
Aug 17 2009, 11:25 AM
by
Jim Jubak
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
 It was a good second quarter from Kinross Gold (KGC), considering the uncertainties of the mining business, where anything from an ore body running a lower grade than expected to floods to civil war can disrupt production.
Earnings of 12 cents a share for the second quarter were a penny below Wall Street’s expectations, but revenue climbed 100.2% from the second quarter of 2008. At $598 million, revenue easily beat projections of $543 million.
Most importantly, despite a slowdown in getting the Paracatu mine expansion up to full production, the company kept its production estimates at 2.3 million to 2.4 million ounces of gold for 2009. When I picked this stock in April, I noted that gold production was expected to hit 2.4 million ounces in 2009, a huge increase in production from the 1.5 million ounces produced in 2006. Bing: More on Kinross Gold
My preference at this point, when near-term inflation remains subdued thanks to a global economic slowdown, is for shares of gold miners
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Posted
Mar 26 2009, 03:26 PM
by
Anthony Mirhaydari
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
Until last year's epic collapse, many believed commodity prices would continue to rise as the world depleted its reserves of metals, fuels, and farmland. Scarcity drives price! A Malthusian reality! Prices can only go up! Then crude oil fell from $147 to a low of $35.
These beliefs weren't wrong; they were just too early. A new paradigm is at hand, delayed by the global recession, which will test the ability of our planet to sustain current rates of consumption. Now that green shoots of new economic growth are starting to appear, just as investments in new mines and oil projects are reduced, commodity prices are rising again. Fears of inflation, along with a weakening U.S. dollar, are contributing as well.
Year-to-date, oil is up 18%, gasoline is up 42%, and copper is up 28%. Even lumber prices, strongly tied to the fortunes of new home construction, are up 5%. Companies like Exxon Mobil (XOM), Freeport-McMoRan (FCX), and Imperial Oil (IMO) will benefit.
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Posted
Jun 26 2009, 01:57 PM
by
Anthony Mirhaydari
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
It may seem like a funny time to be talking about gold stocks. After all, gold prices haven't been doing much lately as inflation expectations have ebbed and the dollar has stabilized. Gold's role as a safe haven asset hasn't been in high demand either as stock market volatility has plunged to levels not seen since last September.
But I see a number of compelling reasons to take a closer look. For one, as I discussed earlier, volatility expectations have reached levels associated with significant tops in the stock markets. An increase in volatility would cause investors to dump risky stocks and bonds in favor of more stable stores of value like gold. Despite Thursday's big rise, breadth and volume trends still suggest lower prices are needed to reverse the big decline in buying power seen since the beginning of May.
Another problem is that the U.S. dollar has come under renewed pressure after China's central bank repeated its call to create a global currency.
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Posted
Jun 04 2009, 10:50 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
This isn't a good sign. Northwestern Mutual, the third-largest life insurer in the country, has bought gold for the first time in its history, Bloomberg reports. And it bought a lot. “Gold just seems to make sense; it’s a store of value,” chief executive Edward Zore told Bloomberg. “In the Depression, gold did very, very
well.” Northwestern now has about $400 million in gold. The way Zore sees it, the investment just can't go bad.
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Posted
Sep 08 2009, 07:39 AM
by
Minyanville
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
This article is written by Minyanville's Lance Lewis
I was wrong about gold breaking out last month. See Gold to Break $1,000 This August. Turns out the yellow metal didn’t break out over $1000 until eight days later (i.e. today).
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, what now? A vast amount of ink has been spilled over the past several days by analysts trying to divine what gold’s rally "means." The most popular opinion appears to be that it’s just random noise and means nothing. However, let’s go to the scoreboard and see if that view is generally correct. For more on where the metal is headed, see Will September Patterns Hold for Gold?
Bing: Precious Metals
First, let’s start with a little history. Gold peaked at $850 after its 2400% romp in the 1970s and then cratered. At the time, inflation was the big concern, and many claimed gold’s decline was just a bubble collapsing and that inflation would be a problem forever going forward. Turned out that 1980 was the peak in long-term interest rates and most commodity prices per the CCI equal-weighted commodity index. Gold went nowhere but down from 1980 to 2001, just as the CCI and inflation did. So in a very real sense, gold told you quite accurately that inflation was falling and would keep falling.
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Posted
Jun 16 2009, 11:43 AM
by
Vad Yazvinski
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
"I have seen the future and it is very much like the present - only longer"
Kehlog Albran
During an interview on “60 Minutes” back in March, Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke said: "And I think as those green shoots begin to appear in different markets, and as some confidence begins to come back, that will begin the positive dynamic that brings our economy back."
This “green shoots” mantra quickly became a rallying point for the entire investing community. Most economists started looking for any positive signs in the economy that could confirm that “things are getting worse more slowly.”
Some of them have found their strongest argument in an unusual place -- the commodities market. Oil, copper and many other natural resources have rallied more than 70% off the lows hit back in March.
And thus, as the “green shoots” argument goes, this sharp rebound in prices for the “base commodities” like oil and copper shows that the pace of economic decline is clearly slowing – and may be the strongest leading indicator of an upcoming rebound in the world economy.
I think that this logic is just as flawed as the “peak oil” and “decoupling” theories were last summer. In my opinion, the speculative demand triggered by a cheaper dollar, combined with talk of theoretical hyperinflation, accounts for vast majority of the commodities’ recent advance
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Posted
Apr 28 2008, 04:01 PM
by
Charley Blaine
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
Earnings from Royal Dutch Shell and BP today just about guarantee that ExxonMobil is going to report some truly gaudy first-quarter revenue and profits on Thursday.
And they're only going to get bigger as the year rolls along. So big, in fact, that Exxon's revenue by the end of the year may be greater than the gross domestic product of Sweden, the world's 18th-largest economy.
Here's how the numbers could work:
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Posted
Sep 18 2009, 04:41 PM
by
John Reese
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
My investment philosophy is rooted in the idea that beating the market is less about reinventing the wheel and more about listening to the right people. That's how I came to develop my Guru Strategy computer models, and it's why I take a look every Friday at what the market gurus I follow are saying.
In a week in which the economy has shown several signs of life, a number of these gurus have been sounding bullish -- though the optimism has been tempered with some words of caution.
For starters, Warren Buffett -- whose approach is the basis of the Guru Strategy I'm using for Wall Street Survivor -- sounded off this week, saying that the economy has at last leveled off. “We have not bounced, but we’ve quit going down," he told CNBC. "We are on the mend." Buffett pointed to uptrends in the housing market over the past several months as one of the key positive signs. And, in an interview with Fortune, Buffett said he's been buying stocks, with orders in on two picks this week. (He was tight-lipped about just which shares he's purchasing, however.)
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Posted
Apr 28 2009, 07:41 AM
by
MSN Editors
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
MSN Money investing columnist Jim Jubak frequently updates recent columns and offers insights on economic news. These updates appeared in his most recent column, "5 tech stocks full of promise," published April 28. To see more of Jim's picks and their performance, click here.
"Euro, yen make dollar look good": China has been quietly buying gold. Lots of gold. That is about what you'd expect from the country with the world's biggest foreign-exchange reserves.
Because the Chinese have managed to do much of their buying from domestic gold producers, the move hasn't done much for the price of gold so far. But that would change if other central banks decided to follow China's lead and reversed recent policies of selling gold.
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Posted
Jun 03 2009, 10:10 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
Chinese investors have gone crazy for gold, and are rushing to hoard it over concerns about a lingering global recession, China Daily reports. The price of gold has jumped nearly 7% in the last month on the Shanghai Gold Exchange. Much of the increase is due to more demand for gold jewelry and gold bars. Also hot right now are shares of Chinese gold producers on the Shanghai and Shenzen stock exchanges. "The declining value of the dollar along with the worsening economic outlook is forcing investors to seek other anti-inflationary investment tools, like gold," said one Chinese analyst. Here in the U.S., some strange things are happening related to gold.
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