One reason put forward by market participants on Thursday to explain gold’s sudden surge higher were large ETF flows stemming from the soon-to-be-closed Powershares DB Crude Oil Double Long Oil ETN.
We’ve had a look at what’s been going on in the precious metals exchange-traded-fund space and it does indeed seem that there have been some impressive flows into certain products of late.
For example, ETF Securities’ Palladium and Gold funds both hit a record size on Wednesday of 408,875.366 ounces.
Here’s how the flows into the UK-listed palladium product look historically (these hit a record of 404,597.909 ounces on Wednesday) when compared to the platinum UK-listed product.
For comparison here’s how shares in both products have performed in the same period, starting with ETFS Physical Palladium:
But that’s nothing compared to the recent inflows into ETFS Securities’ UK-listed gold fund:
Combined holdings of the manager’s UK-listed and Australian-listed gold funds now stand at 7,991,934.020 ounces, ranking it the second largest exchange-traded gold product after the SPDR Gold Trust which holds 34,138,942 ounces worth of gold.
So popular it has been of late, in fact, the fund’s managers, UBS, have even filed a request with the SEC for the creation of $9.82bn worth of shares for a brand new Gold Trust to take on the SPDR Gold Trust head on. That compares to a current NAV of around $3.25bn for the London-listed fund, by our calculation.
Meanwhile, just for curiosity’s sake, here are the latest top holdings in the London-listed ETFS Physical Gold and DB Powershares double oil fund according to Bloomberg data:
