The last trading session was a broad, indiscriminate selloff in mining equities. Silver miners fell 5.58 percent, uranium miners 5.57 percent, gold miners 5.21 percent, copper miners 5.19 percent and rare earth miners 5.12 percent, according to the sector tables published this morning. BHP fell 3.25 percent and Rio Tinto 1.63 percent, while lithium and battery shares fell a smaller 1.85 percent, the only complex to lose less than two percent.
The underlying metals did not confirm the move. Silver futures settled 2.36 percent higher at 50.26 dollars an ounce, copper rose 1.02 percent to 6.52 dollars a pound and gold futures edged up 0.24 percent to 3,908.20 dollars an ounce. On a one week view the metals remain lower, with silver down 7.12 percent and gold down 3.22 percent, but on the day itself miners fell hard into rising settlements.
That gap matters for how to read the tape. Spot markets had a violent intraday session on Friday, when spot gold fell to a one year low and spot silver broke below 50 dollars as investors sold metals to cover losses in technology shares, a move covered in Saturday’s edition. The futures settlements and the miner closes published today show the equity side kept falling even where the metal side stabilised, which is the pattern of position liquidation rather than a fresh deterioration in producer economics.
The weekly numbers keep the caution honest. Gold miners are down 3.88 percent on the week, silver miners 3.79 percent, rare earth miners 2.86 percent and copper miners 1.55 percent, so the sector is in a genuine downtrend, not a one day dislocation. But a reader pricing producers off Friday’s metal settlements alone would have expected a flat to modestly positive session for precious metal miners, not a five percent fall.
The next test is whether the divergence closes from the equity side, as it usually does when the driver is liquidation, or from the metal side, which would say the futures settlements were the stale signal. Monday’s Asian session was not reassuring: Australian resources were under pressure again, with BHP down 1.4 percent and Northern Star down 4.8 percent in early trade.