2008 Was Golden...Barely

January 07, 2009

By Brad Zigler

The start of a new year is usually punctuated in the financial press with all sorts of look-back stories amid the forecasts for the upcoming 12 months. No matter what rags you read, I'll bet you found precious few wistful expressions of nostalgia for 2008. By and large, all the indexes finished the year on a sour note. Even the once-ascendant commodity benchmarks faltered.

Some long-only commodity products, though, are still ahead of their 200-day moving averages. Not surprisingly, these are Precious Metals trackers, particularly those based on gold. It's a pretty short list. After all, few exchange-traded products of the commodity stripe have actually been around for 200 trading days.

Mature Long Gold Exchange-Traded Product Performance

(07-Jan-08 through 06-Jan-09)

So, gold products just barely eked out a gain for the year. Well, two of 'em at least. The negative return generated by the PowerShares DB Gold Fund (NYSE Arca: DGL) can be blamed on contango – the price spread between near- and distant-term futures deliveries. The SPDR Gold Shares Trust (NYSE Arca: GLD) and the iShares COMEX Gold Trust (NYSE Arca: IAU) products are based upon physical metal, not futures. No futures, no contango.

With contango now running large, 2009 should shape up to be an even more interesting year.

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