Content supplied by the World Gold Council
As we look ahead, we expect that the interplay between market risk and economic growth will drive gold demand in 2020. In particular, we focus our attention to:
financial uncertainty and lower interest rates
weakening in global economic growth
gold price volatility.
In our new gold market outlook, we also explore the performance of gold implied by our innovative Gold Valuation Framework across various hypothetical macroeconomic scenarios.
Gold shone in 2019
Gold had its best performance since 2010, rising by 18.4% in US dollar terms last year. It also outperformed major global bond and emerging market stock benchmarks in the same period (Chart 1). In addition, gold prices reached record highs in most major currencies except the US dollar and Swiss franc (see Table 2 in the Appendix).
Gold prices rose most between early June and early September as uncertainty increased and interest rates fell. But investors’ appetite for gold was apparent throughout the year, as seen by strong flows into gold-backed ETFs, growing gold reserves from central banks, and an increase in COMEX net longs positioning.
Gold Outlook Chart 1: Gold outperformed bonds and EM stocks
Annual performance of major global assets *
Sources: Bloomberg, ICE Benchmark Administration, World Gold Council; Disclaimer
*As of 31 December 2019. Annual returns based on the LBMA Gold Price, Bloomberg Barclays US Treasury Index and Global Treasury Index ex US, ICE BAML US 3-month Tbill Index, Bloomberg Barclays US Corporate and High Yield Indices, MSCI EM Index, Bloomberg Commodity TR Index, MSCI EAFE Index, S&P 500 Indices, and Bloomberg Oil TR Index.
High risks and low rates on the horizon
We expect that many of the global dynamics seeded over the past few years will remain generally supportive for gold in 2020.
In particular, we believe that:
Read the full commentary, analysis, and see hypothetical forecasts for gold performance in 2020 as implied by Qaurum based on a range of maco-economic scenarios developed by Oxford Economics in our new outlook, or try Qaurum to customise your own scenarios.
This article is a re-post from here.
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