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Hello all, it's Bob Pasani. Welcome to ETF Edge. This is your go-to place for everything ETF related. And of course, as I said, I'm your host, Bob Pasani. And we've got two of the best in the business, two old friends with me today. Chris uh Hemstead is director of institutional business development at Index IQ.
Dave Nodic is uh the uh CIO and the director of research at ETF Trends. Guys, I want to hit on the hot topic of the moment, which is uh gold and the gold ETF here. Gold miners are spiking on very heavy volume here after billionaire investor Warren Buffett's Bergkshire Hathaway firm revealed he's betting on Barrack Gold.
That's very, very interesting. Van Vector's gold miners ETF, that's GDX, is up 6% today on pace for its best day in almost four months. Uh this is a new investment for Bergkshire Hathaway. But you know, uh Dave, I've said this many times, Mr. Buffett has complained in the past that gold is an unproductive asset.
That unlike stocks, it doesn't pay out any earnings. It doesn't pay any dividends. Unlike bonds, it doesn't pay any interest. It's curious. I know this is Bergkshire Hathway may not be Warren Buffett's personal pick, but it's curious that they're interested in gold right now. Is there something in the air besides the old uh old gold bugs, or is something changing out there in the atmosphere?
Well, I mean, I we look, it's clear the ETF investors want to be in gold. We just had the most amazing first half we've ever had. We had 734 tons of gold end up in gold ETFs as a block. That's more than the best year we've ever had for gold ETFs, which was 2009. So, clearly investors are are looking at that.
At the same time, there's a de a supply story here, too. Supply is down about 15% year-over-year. That's partially because of COVID shutdowns, but it's also just getting really hard to get gold out of the ground. So, the supply side is a really bullish story. The demand side has really been purely an investment story from financial buyers, folks who are in ETFs.
We haven't seen much demand really at all on the retail side. First half demand for uh for uh things like gold bars were at 11-year lows. Uh and jewelry demand's down quite a bit as well. So there's a bit of, you know, two sides of this coin, but there's no question that investors are looking for safe haven assets.
And while gold may in fact be unproductive, that is true. It's never paid a dividend. Uh when people are looking for something to hedge against potential, you know, inflation coming off all the Fed easing that we've been seeing and and also just the general state of the world right now, if we're looking for the next six months, have having a little safety doesn't seem dumb.
You know, uh, Chris, this is sort of hard to to pull the threads apart from this, but gold stocks do tend to move in tandem with gold, but because they're stocks, they can also move in tandem with the stock market. So, this is a little hard to pull this thread apart for us. We saw when the market dropped dramatically, the stock market dropped dramatically in March.
Gold stock dropped along with it. When gold started recovering a little uh in April and again in June, gold stocks started rising with it. So, so which is it? Is there is is there some correlation with both uh gold stocks and gold and the stock market overall? Just pull that thread apart for us. Yeah, I think I think you could make a higher correlation of gold stocks to the stock market for a number of reasons.
One is, you know, they're governed. They're share issuance. They're sensitive to, you know, to cash flow. They're sensitive to regulation. Um they're also going to be you know look gold mining stocks are also going to be sensitive to uh to the new hot theme which is ESG. Um you know being compliant being you know like there's there's a number of things that affect a gold mining company that are unique to you know to a corporation.
Whereas with physical gold you know the bars of gold that are sitting in a vault really don't have any of those those other costs and risks associated with it. And so for that reason, I think you're going to see a higher correlation of gold stocks to the equity market. That being said, Bob, I also think that, you know, the correlation itself is a little bit loose.
You know, we do look to the physical metal uh as an inflationary play. Um, you know, to Dave's points about the supply chain being very disrupted throughout COVID. uh addition in addition to that demand for physical gold for the ETF and coupled with the fact that one of the largest drivers of of gold supply and demand is um is that jewelry business which comes a lot from uh from India um very disrupted so there's a lot of moving factors with the physical part of it um with the price of gold's you know going as high as it is gold miners are more relevant now than they were before so I see the I see the uh the direction that people are going in yeah so So, so Dave, just to close out this this part on on gold, we've talked about this before.
Gold, the GLD, the gold ETF, the biggest one, is uh 80 billion in assets now. It's the sixth largest ETF out there. You you said you think it could go to a hundred billion dollars. I I is that fairly certain at this point? I mean, is there's nothing that's going to turn that around? Like, gold's being bought as a hedge against uncertainty, at least right now.
Some people think it's a hedge against inflation or deflation, but hedge against uncertainty. Uh you don't see anything changing that fundamental mindset right now. Is that correct? No. I mean, you know, fundamentally, this is a a commodity of psychology, right? It's worth what people are willing to pay for it.
And when people get nervous and they decide now's the time to buy gold, I don't particularly see any reason for that to change until we have a change in investor sentiment and people are really wanting to put all of their money back on risk and I just don't see that happening over the next six months.
Obviously, the broad markets have been doing great, but what we're seeing here in gold is just further evidence that a lot of investors are actually kind of in a riskoff mode. I mean despite what's going on in equities, we had negative flows in equities last in over the last three months, but here we are talking about gold and gold stocks.
I I can't believe we're you know but wait Dave are we really going to say that risk off on gold miners that I mean that's but in that in that I mean it's funny that that's you know we are seeing that riskoff movement but a shift to gold miners I think is yeah I think the miners are actually quite I think they're quite risky um for all the you're susceptible to both the movement in the price of gold and the movement of these companies and there and as you pointed out Chris there's always single stock blowup risk when you start putting companies to work right things Management can be bad at its job. There are all sorts of things that can go wrong in a company.
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