Miner ETF's going down with the herd

Miner ETF's are not a valid alternative to avoid the lagging of precious metal miners compared to bullion or bullion ETFs.

Gold relative to the Philadelphia Gold & Silver Miners index

The past cyclical gold bear market has been both lengthy and severe for the precious metals, but for precious metal miners it has been detrimental. 'How devastating the gold and silver miner bear market has been' is well illustrated when plotting a miners index together with gold on a comparable scale.

Gold miners: three decades for naught

The Philadelphia gold and silver mining index (ticker symbol XAU) has been around since Jan 19, 1979, initiated at 100 with gold quoting $230.5. Fast forward to 2015 January 22: Gold topped $1302 (after the long anticipated QE-bazooka by the ECB), while the XAU closed at 81.12. Even though revenues per ounce are more than fivefold higher, the mining index lost 18.88% in 36 years.

Benchmarking the HUI versus the XAU

There are two gold and silver miners indices frequently referred to:

1. Philadelphia Gold and Silver miners index with ticker ^XAU   (data since Dec 19, 1983) and
2. the AMEX Unhedged Gold Bugs Index with ticker ^HUI (data since Jun 04, 1996)

In a previous posting, I have been checking the long term performance of the present components of the HUI index. Today's focus is on benchmarking the HUI versus the XAU.

In both cases the past reference date has been July 31, 2002. There are data for all present HUI components going back to that date. For the present XAU components this is not the case: Silver Wheaton started quoting on TSX only by end 2004 and on the NYSE only in 2005. The long-term performance over nearly a decade of the HUI is 4.750, meaning that $1 turns into $4.75 over this period. For the ^XAU the long term performance is 3.086. The ^HUI outperforms the ^XAU by an aggregated of 53.9% or an annualized 4.6%.

The MVGDXJ Junior gold mining index

Close to a year ago, I first pointed to this junior mining index used as a benchmark for Van Eck’s GDXJ junior mining ETF. See : A junior gold mining index. Back then, the index was managed by the German firm “4asset-management”. Recently Van Eck took over the index calculation. Its composition and time series are now revealed on Van Eck’s website… for those to whom an access is granted. Whereas initially the access policy seemed rather liberal, now it has become restricted to ‘finance professionals’ (which doesn’t include me as a blogger.) The present posting is therefore the final one on this topic.

Miners' performance relative to precious metals

Abstract
The focus of this article is on the gold and silver miners from a tactical point of view: how do PM miners perform relative to the price of gold or silver. Data used are 2012 Jan 10.
Special attention is paid to the miners covered by the database 'Canadian gold and silver mining', for which a capital weighted index of gold- and silver miners is calculated. Aggregated performance is one thing, it's also very illustrative that miner and explorer performance has been diverging from outperforming the metals by a wide margin to losing ground completely.

Decades of underperformance

Gold investors may not like this, but the main Gold & Silver miners index, that has been around for a while, exhibits decades of underperformance.
The gold miners index most referenced now is the "Unhedged Gold Bugs index" with ticker ^HUI. You can find data on Yahoo going back to 1996 for this index. However the Philadelphia Gold & Silver Miners index (ticker ^XAU) goes back way before this. Yahoo posts XAU data from 1983 onwards, but the index may be older than that. One main difference between the two is the inclusion of Freeport McMoran in the Philadelphia Gold & Silver Miners index, with a heavy weight of about 13%.
Recently I've focussed on how the HUI does outperform bullion during the gold rallies, but still fails to catch up since it fell into the abyss back in October 2008. See: Did you say leverage?
As for now I will focus on the Philadelphia Gold & Silver Miners index, abbreviated XAU henceforth.