Monday’s divergence ran in reverse. In the latest market tables, gold miners fell 5.43 percent, silver miners fell 5.43 percent, copper miners fell 3.16 percent, rare earth miners fell 3.50 percent, uranium miners fell 3.47 percent and lithium and battery shares fell 2.23 percent. BHP fell 2.10 percent and Rio Tinto fell 2.14 percent. Every miner group in the table was down.
The metals went the other way. Gold futures rose 0.71 percent to $4,058.80 an ounce, silver futures rose 3.58 percent to $52.93 an ounce and copper rose 1.37 percent to $6.30 a pound. A session earlier the pattern was inverted: miners had risen between 4.41 percent and 6.18 percent across the same groups while gold, silver and copper futures all fell.
Two opposite divergences on consecutive sessions carry a simple lesson. Neither day’s miner move was a verdict on the underlying metal, because the metal moved against the miners both times. The tape is being set by positioning and risk appetite in the equities, and readers pricing miners off the metal alone would have been wrong in both directions this week. The weekly picture still favours holders: gold miners are up 11.46 percent on the week and silver miners up 10.72 percent despite the daily fall.