Gold passes along price gains to precious metal ETFs

Article Excerpt

The price of gold has regularly hit multi-year highs since mid-May 2019. It’s not surprising then that investment flows into gold-linked ETFs are also rising rapidly. Trade tensions between the two largest economies in the world, the U.S. and China, changes in monetary policy, looming concerns over Brexit, market volatility, geopolitical concerns and negative interest rates have all supported demand for gold investment. Global gold-backed ETFs had $2.6 billion U.S. of net inflows across all regions in July. That means they increased their collective gold holdings by 52 tonnes to 2,600 tonnes—a level not seen since March 2013. So far this year, gold-backed ETFs added 159 tonnes of gold (a 6.4% increase) to their portfolios as investor money flowed in. North America dominated July’s flows: it added 43 tonnes to regional gold holdings, led by the SPDR Gold Shares (New York symbol GLD) and the iShares Gold Trust (New York symbol IAU). Together, these two funds accounted for 75% of net…