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Silver and Nickel in Focus as Investors Turn More Positive on Global Growth
ETF Securities – Silver and Nickel in Focus as Investors Turn More Positive on Global Growth. Over the past week investors have turned more positive in the outlook for the global economy and for a peaceful resolution to the Ukrainian crisis, with more industrially-sensitive commodities like silver and nickel seeing strong inflows and gold seeing outflows. Although US bond yields have been declining recently, possibly partly due to weaker than expected growth data from the US in the first part of the year, most forward looking indicators point to US recovery in 2Q 2014 and into the second half of the year. Stronger US growth, together with indications China’s stimulus policies are starting to have a positive effect on China growth (PMIs hit 5 year highs in May), increase our confidence that global recovery remains on track, supporting our positive view on broad commodity performance, with the industrial metals, platinum and palladium our top picks.
ETFS Daily Leveraged Silver (LSIL) receives US$9mn of inflows as investors rotate out of gold into silver. Silver inventories have been trending down this year as industrial demand has picked up. Due to its larger industrial demand base, silver tends to be more correlated with the business cycle. Supply and demand indicators are turning price positive in our view. Increasing demand from China, increasing investor demand and strong fabrication demand are being met with falling supply and dwindling inventories.
Gold ETPs see the biggest outflows since March as investors focus on more cyclical commodities. A stronger dollar, coupled with fears of a slowdown in physical demand from China, weighed on the gold price last week driving US$52mn of outflows from gold ETPs. While Chinese net gold imports are up 18% so far this year compared to 2013, recent data shows China imported the least gold since February 2013 in April, feeding fears of dwindling physical buying. In our view this is not the beginning of a new trend and we expect continued robust China gold buying in the coming weeks months.
ETFS Nickel (NICK) see $17mn of inflows following price correction. Despite the recent correction in prices, nickel remains the best performing industrial metal this year with a 37% ytd price rise. While we believe that nickel may have near-term upside on momentum buying, stretched positioning and elevated inventories could cap further price rises. At the same time, long copper ETPs saw US$8.1mn of outflows last week on concerns over the US economy after Q1 GDP was revised downward from +0.1% to -1.0%. Given positioning and sentiment, we view copper as a less risky way to play the rebound in global growth.
Platinum and palladium ETPs see US$14.1mn of outflows as talks between miners and unions resume. An inter-governmental technical team composed of representatives from the government, the three biggest miners and the AMCU is working on a possible resolution to the 19-week long South African strikes. Supply of both metals has become a lot tighter in recent months, impairing producers’ ability to meet their contractual obligations. We believe platinum and palladium could rally sharply should mining companies fail to meet all contractual obligations or announce active metal buying on the open market.
ETFS Daily Leveraged Wheat (LWEA) records US$4.1mn of inflows on lower expected global wheat crop in 2014. The International Grains Council lowered its estimate for this year’s global wheat production last week, claiming that bad weather has adversely affected crop conditions. However, the wheat price dropped by a further 4.1% last week, as investors became more optimistic on a peaceful resolution to the Ukrainian crisis. Ukraine and Russia account for 16% of global wheat exports.
Key events to watch this week
This week the focus will be on the ECB rate decision with a cut in rates increasingly likely this month. US Non-farm payrolls will also be monitored to assess the strength of the US economy and the pace of tapering by the Fed.
Important Information
This communication has been issued and approved for the purpose of section 21 of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 by ETF Securities (UK) Limited (”ETFS UK”) which is authorised and regulated by the United Kingdom Financial Conduct Authority (”FCA”).
Every month, our research team will present the cryptoassets of the month that increased or dropped in value by more than 15%. With a data-driven approach, we highlight the most important developments and events causing price movements.
Figure 1 – 30-Day Performance: Cryptoassets of the Month vs. Traditional Asset Classes
Data Source: 21Shares, CoinGecko, and Yahoo Finance, from 30-Apr-2023 to 31-May-2023 (Close Price)
Ethereum (ETH)
Ethereum traded down 0.57% over the past month. On May 15, Lido V2 went live, enabling users to withdraw their stETH (staked Ether). As of May 31, Lido has processed over 460k stETH withdrawals without voluntarily exiting a single validator. The protocol achieved this by implementing a buffer that accumulates ETH via daily deposits, partial withdrawals, and rewards. On the scaling front, Aztec revealed its “hybrid zk-rollup,” which will enable private smart contract execution, allowing users to protect their data and on-chain activity with programmable anonymity. Finally, Ethereum’s beacon chain suffered a technical issue that caused the network to stop finalizing blocks briefly.
Bitcoin (BTC)
Bitcoin traded down 7.21% over the past month. On May 17, Tether announced it would use 15% of its monthly net operating profits (i.e., the realized gains from T-bills and similar investments) to buy Bitcoin. The move aims to diversify Tether’s reserve surplus. In addition, it could have a considerable effect on BTC’s structural supply and demand dynamics, as it can offset a significant portion of the selling pressure we can expect from the 41k BTC that the U.S. government intends to sell this year. On another front, transaction fees on the Bitcoin network rose five-fold from $23.5 million in April to $124 million in May, primarily driven by Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens.
Decentraland (MANA)
Decentraland (MANA) traded down 15.08% over the past month as activity in the decentralized virtual world waned significantly. About 2,740 unique wallet addresses interacted with Decentraland throughout May, down ~26% from April. In other news, on May 18, Decentraland DAO introduced “Decentraland Studios,” a platform to connect creators who want to build experiences on the platform but lack the technical skills to do it. This move is part of a broader trend in crypto attempting to lower the barrier of entry for new developers and creators.
Stacks (STX)
Stack’s native token STX traded down 16.47% over the past month. On May 23, ALEX – the most prominent decentralized exchange (DEX) on the Stacks network – introduced permissionless listings for BRC-20 tokens. Despite the combined market cap of BRC-20 tokens reaching close to $500 million, they mainly consist of “meme coins” because Bitcoin does not natively support smart contracts, nor is it designed for fast performance. Thus, Bitcoin needs Layer 2s like Stacks to be usable at scale and open the segway for new use cases. Regarding ecosystem traction, the Stacks networks reached 65,000 deployed smart contracts on May 25.
Avalanche (AVAX)
Avalanche’s native token AVAX traded down 17.85% over the past month despite exciting ecosystem developments. On May 24, Ava Labs announced AvaCloud, a launchpad that allows businesses to deploy custom, fully managed blockchains using an intuitive no-code portal. In addition, the AvaCloud product suite includes managed validators with automated installation for enhanced security, comprehensive data tools, and chain interoperability between all blockchains on the Avalanche network. If successful, the release could mark a paradigm shift in enterprise adoption by removing the complexity of building a public or private blockchain.
Algorand (ALGO)
Algorand’s native token ALGO traded down 18.34% over the past month, underperforming the broader market. The Algorand Foundation recently released AlgoKit, an application that handles the developer environment setup, project generation, and deployment. AlgoKit aims to lower the barrier of entry for developers entering the ecosystem. In this regard, attracting new talent is an area Algorand has struggled with – the blockchain had only 38 full-time developers as of April 2023, according to Electric Capital. The network’s inability to attract new talent may be worrisome as developer engagement is an early and leading indicator of value creation.
Fantom (FTM)
Fantom’s native token FTM traded down 26.28% over the past month. On May 8, the Fantom Hackathon Q2 2023 opened for submissions with a prize pool of over $300k for innovative dApps built on the blockchain. On May 17, the Fantom Foundation released Fantom Academy, a series of lessons for developers, including Solidity basics, token standards, and more. Finally, regarding ecosystem traction, Fantom became available on The Graph, allowing developers to leverage subgraphs to load data on the Fantom blockchain securely and reliably into their dApps.
Strategies of the Month: March 2023
Every month, our research team will also present the best-performing strategies of the month in our product suite. With a data-driven approach, we highlight the most important developments and events causing price movements.
Figure 2: 30-Day Performance: Strategies of the Month vs. Traditional Asset Classes Data
Source: 21Shares Index Management Console and Yahoo Finance, from 28-Apr-2023 to 31-May-2023 (Close Price)
SBTC
The 21Shares Short Bitcoin ETP (SBTC) rose 5.72% over the past month. SBTC seeks to provide a -1x return to the performance of Bitcoin for a single day. Despite its strong fundamentals, BTC’s implied annual volatility has consistently been above 70% and has experienced drawdowns from its all-time high of more than 80%. By comparison, the annual volatility of the S&P 500 sits around 20%. As a result, sophisticated investors with stringent risk-management practices may benefit from tactical short-term inverse exposure to BTC.
Research Newsletter
Each week the 21Shares Research team will publish our data-driven insights into the crypto asset world through this newsletter. Please direct any comments, questions, and words of feedback to research@21shares.com
Disclaimer
The information provided does not constitute a prospectus or other offering material and does not contain or constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of any offer to buy securities in any jurisdiction. Some of the information published herein may contain forward-looking statements. Readers are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties and that actual results may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors. The information contained herein may not be considered as economic, legal, tax or other advice and users are cautioned to base investment decisions or other decisions solely on the content hereof.
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