I came across the following chart that shows the annual performance of gold against the major assets classes of US and UK from 1978 to 2017. Similar to equities gold has performed well in some years and not so well in others. Gold tend to soar during periods of extreme bear markets for risky assets such as stocks.
Click to enlarge
Note: All returns are based on US dollars
Source: BullionVault
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Canadian stocks have performed poorly compared to their American peers in the past five years. In fact, the S&P 500 has earned double the return of Canadian equities in the past years as shown in the chart below:
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Source: Yahoo Finance
One of the main reason for the poor performance of the market up north is that commodities did not do well during the same time period. As a commodity-based economy it is no surprise that Canadian stocks have under-performed so poorly.
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Colombia has elected Convservative Iván Duque as the next President in the runoff Presidential election held yesterday. Duque got 53.9% of the vote and beat leftist opponent Gustavo Petro. The pro-business friendly Duque has the support of former president Uribe and business leaders.
From an article at The Guardian:
Colombia has chosen Iván Duque, a conservative neophyte, to be its next president after a long and divisive campaign that often centred on a controversial peace process with leftist rebels the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc).
Duque, who opposes the peace deal, won in a second round runoff election on Sunday with 53.9% of the vote. His vanquished opponent, Bogotá’s former mayor Gustavo Petro – once a leftist militant himself – defends the peace process.
Despite being the first leftist in the conservative country’s history to come so close to the presidency, he lost on the night, taking 41.8% of the vote.
Many now worry about the fate of the fragile peace deal signed with the Farc in 2016, which formally ended 52 years of civil war that left 220,000 dead and seven million displaced.
Source: Iván Duque wins election to become Colombia’s president, The Guardian, June 17, 2018
As a result of the conservative win, Colombian stocks could get a boost today. Five Colombian companies including Ecopetrol(EC) and Bancolombia(CIB) trade on the US exchanges. A few more trade on the OTC markets. Oil giant Eocpetrol has soared in the past year and has room to increase further depending on global oil prices.
Disclosure: Long CIB and EC
The two major crude oil benchmarks are WTI and Brent. WTI stands for West Texas Intermediate used for US oil and Brent is the global benchmark and denotes the oil extracted from North Sea.
The WTI closed at $66.94 today on the NYMEX for July 2018 delivery and Brent ended at $75.81 on the ICE for Aug 2018 delivery.
The graphic below shows some of the basic differences between WTI and Brent crude oil:
Click to enlarge
Below is a short video explaining the differences:
Source: What is the Difference between WTI and Brent Crude Oil?,
Focus Economics
The Top 10 Gold Producing Countries based on 2017 data is shown in the chart below. Surprisingly China was the top producer last year beating Australia and South Africa. Many investors myself included may not know that China mines gold let alone being the largest gold producer in the world.
Click to enlarge
Source: Top 10 Gold Producing Countries, U.S. Global Investors
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