Are you brave enough to profit from a collapse in gold?
If you are, put your money where your mouth is and buy put options
OK, gold haters. It’s time to put your money where your mouth is.
You think gold could be going down to $350 an ounce? That’s great. Then go out there and buy some put options on the yellow metal. They will pay out, but huge, if your prediction comes anywhere close to being right.
We’re talking very little money down, and a profit of more than 3,000% if you’re right. Cha-ching!
I love writing about gold, because there’s a secret about the gold market that absolutely no professional financial writer or money manager or analyst is allowed to reveal to you all on pain of … well, trolling.
The secret?
Nobody knows a damn thing.
Nobody knows what this metal is worth. Nobody knows if it’s worth a lot or a little. Nobody really knows what drives the price either. They say they do, but they don’t. Is it fiat money? Is it Indian brides? Is it central bankers? Is it the mysterious manipulation of central bankers? Is it bug-eyed Martians using secret death rays?
Nobody has a clue.
The smartest gold bug I’ve ever met, Jim Grant of newsletter fame, told me once that gold was a relative bet. Gold would go up, he said, as the credibility of central bankers went down.
It was a reasonable point. Logically, according to supply and demand, gold could go “up” as the dollar went down, and the dollar could go down if you flooded the market with dollars.
But gold could go up to … what? And at what point would that lack of credibility become fully reflected in the price? How high is too high?
The other smartest gold commentator I ever met was a guy in a T-shirt sitting next to me in a bar in Miami a few years back. “Anyone’s opinion on gold,” he said, “is worth as much as anyone else’s. Nobody really knows anything.”
He’s right.
Does gold really serve any serious monetary purpose in the modern age? Once upon a time, back in the days of ancient times and camels and silk traders and so on, a trader in, say, Samarkand had no ability to talk to a merchant in, say, Venice. A recognized and shared medium of exchange, such as gold, served a purpose. Now they can communicate via phone, email, text or whatever.
Gold was nearly $2,000 an ounce back in 2011, when Donald Trump helpfully called the peak of the market by suddenly saying it was going to go a lot higher because President Obama was destroying the U.S. dollar.
Today it’s just over $1,000 and, according to my colleague Mark Hulbert, some people are saying it could slump all the way down to $350. Fair value is allegedly around $800 an ounce, based upon complex proprietary algorithms conducted in an underground vault — on the WOPR — at the federal department of guesswork.
The simplest way to bet on $350 gold is to buy put options on the SPDR Gold Shares ETF GLD, -0.79% the biggest and most widely traded “bullion” fund on the market. Each share of the ETF corresponds to one-tenth of an ounce of gold. Put options are cheap contracts that pay off big-time if the price plunges.
Currently SPDR Gold Shares ETF trades at $104. The most extreme put is the $55 option that expires in January 2017. That’s basically a lottery-ticket type bet on a big, big fall in the gold price. If the ETF’s price falls below $55 between now and January 2017, you make a profit. The further below $55 it falls, the bigger your profit. On the other hand, if it never gets down there, your option will just expire, and it will become worthless. You’ll lose your initial stake, but no more.
Those puts will cost you 55 cents each per share. That’s all the money you’d have to risk. You can’t be on the hook for any more.
If gold falls to $350 an ounce, the ETF will fall to around $35 a share, and the option that cost you 55 cents will be worth $20.
That’s around 35 times what you wagered — which is quite some payoff.
Gold bug or gold bear? Show me the money.
Source: MarketWatch/Opinion – Are you brave enough to profit from a collapse in gold?
