You’d think this stuff is finite or something the way the sales of gold have increased over the past two years! The month over month gold sales for the Perth Mint climbed more than 65% but the far more important is year over year shows a very healthy increase as well.
The Perth Mint said on Monday its gold products sales in March surged about 68 percent from the previous month, touching the highest level since November last year.
Sales of gold coins and minted bars in March rose to 32,757 ounces from 19,524 ounces in February, the mint said in a blog post.
Source
If we look at the chart above you can see March 2019 on the very far right coming in just above the 30,000 ounce mark. Reuters is making a big deal of the month over month increase, which is impressive, but it lacks the teeth of year over year. Back track to March 2018 and March 2017 in particular and we have the makings of a pattern.
As you can see gold sales increased by just under 10% year over year. As impressive as this increase seems to be it pales in comparison to March 2017.
With more than 35% increase year over year from March 2017 to March 2018 you would think this should have been widely reported, unfortunately it was not. One of the reasons this is significant is Chinese market. The citizens of China have been and will continue to be one of the largest, if not the single largest market to acquire gold from Perth Mint.
With this super strong 2017 / 2018 year over year growth you would think the gold sales would level off or even backslide, this, however, is not the case. Sales are continuing to climb at a very healthy pace of more than 10%. It seems the word is out. Gold is a finite material, it is money and with more and more news coming out regarding monetary issues, gold acquisitions by central banks around the world and the rot in the global economy it seems the “smart money” is quietly making a move.
If we look at US Mint gold sales in March 2019 we see two dynamics at work and we see why month over month is not a measure of any market. While we a slight decrease in gold sales month over month we see a very dramatic year over year increase.
American Eagle gold coins reached 11,500 ounces, dipping 8% from the 12,500 ounces sold in February while jumping 228.6% from the 3,500 ounces moved in March 2018. First quarter 2019 American Gold Eagle sales at 90,000 ounces are 33.3% higher than the 67,500 ounces delivered during the first three months of last year. Source
This is more support for our thesis that gold is going to begin climbing higher in the COMEX charts. With mining production slipping further and further behind and dramatic increases in gold acquisitions at both the retail and central bank level something is going to break – it has to. There is only so much stress any item can withstand before it reaches its breaking point. We believe we are reaching this point and the COMEX charts will be forced to reflect at least some activity to the upside. We can’t say how much higher gold will go this year but we stand firm in our belief that gold will climb higher.
