More traders notice gold's regularly counterintuitive behavior

1:30p ET Sunday, January 15, 2012

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

Drawing on GATA board member Adrian Douglas' statistical study from August 2010 ("The Gold Market Isn't 'Fixed,' It's Rigged," http://www.gata.org/node/8918), Sam and Bob Kirtley of SK Options Trading in Wellington, New Zealand, yesterday mused at length once again about the likely success of a gold trading fund that exploited the peculiar behavior of the gold market -- rising when the sun sets on London and New York and falling when traders in those cities go back to work.

"The more gold rises overnight in essentially Asian markets," Douglas wrote a year and a half ago, "the more it is sold down into the PM fix. This was exactly the modus operandum of the London Gold Pool but now it is being done covertly."

The Kirtleys comment: "A hypothetical gold investment fund starting with $100 million in 2001, and using it to buy gold at the AM fix and sell it at the PM fix, would now be left with just $31 million, almost a 70 percent loss in just under 10 years. Over the same time period gold prices have risen over 590 percent. From this we can infer that in fact it was possible to make money shorting gold every day for the last decade or so. If a hedge fund or even an individual trader were to have sold gold at the AM fix and covered that short position at the PM fix, for each day of this terrific bull-market run in gold, that fund would have almost tripled its starting capital."

GATA's explanation for this is well known. If those who deny the possibility of gold market manipulation have an explanation for it apart from mere coincidence, we'd love to hear it.

The Kirtleys' commentary is headlined "Revisiting Our Proposal for an Overnight Gold Fund" and it's posted at their other Internet site, Silver-Prices.net, here:

http://www.silver-prices.net/home/revisiting-our-proposal-for-an-overnig...

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.