The Metals Markets outlook webinar; did we change any minds? We did!

By: Rhona O'Connell, Head of Market Analysis

Fri, 21 Jan 2022, 11:07

Our Metals Markets Outlook Webinar – did we change any minds?

Here is a very brief round-up of the way the participants voted in our Metals Outlook yesterday -before and after each session. Did we change any minds? Read on…

Note that the vast majority of participants were from the industry rather than money management. Some analysts were on in the Americas session.

Precious

While I did make it quite clear that silver comes with a wealth warning, my longer term purely fundamental outlook was buoyant, revolving around solar cells and vehicle electrification. This clearly had more of an impact than silver’s historical relationship with gold, which is interesting. Both regions promoted silver to top prospect, which suggests that the decoupling with gold that we saw last year (ratio moving from 65 to touch 80 towards year-end) is expected to continue – but that this time silver gains the ascendancy. It doesn’t normally work like that, but that seems to be the prevailing sentiment (there may also be some views on mean reversion in there). Especially as gold seems to be out of favour all round, especially in the Americas – look at the regional split, which clearly talks to the different attitudes in the regions – the entrenched grass roots interest in Asia in gold’s risk-hedge qualities, whereas the Americas seem to think it has run its course. There was a mild improvement in the numbers who voted gold best, but only a very small decrease in those who voted worst – where it shares top slot with tin.

By contrast no-one loves palladium – again this I suspect is based on the long-term outlook given the seismic shifts in the auto sector that will, as things stand, phase palladium out of the sector and turn autos into a net supplier of Pd rather than accounting for 80% of global industrial demand. This seemed to override the likely upswing in prices when the beleaguered, and nigh-on inventory-free, auto sector, picks up again.

Platinum is also out of favour in terms of best performance in both regions. Interestingly the Asian votes went against it over the course of the presentation, which surprises me as it’s a bull story (apart from the market surplus), but Americas votes saw the “worst” cohort dropping by two-thirds.

Base

In the base metals Natalie did a wonderful hatchet job on tin and moderated expectations for copper, while ali was boosted in both regions. Nickel lost a lot of ground in Asia (and the “worst” vote increased slightly) and was virtually unchanged in the Americas in terms of best performer while it lost some votes in the “worst” cate. No-one likes lead much (auto sector important here), while zinc, which is also relatively unpopular, lost ground in the best category and added to its worst vote, across the board in both categories.

The slide deck is in a separate link into MI for those who are reading this in Market Intelligence; for those listening to the podcast please either log into MI or send me an email asking for the slides, at rhona.oconnell@stonex.com

Precious Metals

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