Gold Miners Winners & Losers: Sector Spikes
NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- As investors poured money into the traditional safe haven of gold Wednesday amid what many fear is the beginning of the end of the long spring-summer rally in equities, one obvious sector has benefited: gold stocks.
Gold futures on the
New York Mercantile Exchange
spiked $22.10, or 2.3%, to $978.66 Wednesday, reaching above $980 intraday. The mystical $1,000 level is now in the viewfinder.
Some of the action on the NYMEX during the session was attributed to big funds moving into gold futures based on technical grounds.
Meanwhile, U.S. stock indices moved into and out of negative territory during the Wednesday session, with traders and investors choosing to put on the backburner another host of relatively positive economic data.
If risk aversion has again become the market's mindset, pushing safe-haven instruments higher across the board, then "gold equities are attractively priced to participate," said Mark Liinamaa, the mining and metals analyst at Morgan Stanley in New York.
Among the world's major gold extractors, trading volumes were heavy.
Barrick
(ABX)
saw its stock jump 7% to $37.54;
Goldcorp
(GG)
gained nearly 8% to $38.96;
Newmont Mining
(NEM) - Get Report
added 7% to $43.01;
Kinross
(KGC) - Get Report
jumped more than 8% to $20.38; and
Anglo-Gold Ashanti
(AU) - Get Report
spiked by the same percentage to $39.28.
The shares of smaller producers were up even more sharply late in Wednesday's regular session.
Agnico-Eagle
(AEM) - Get Report
rose nearly 10% to $61.70;
Yamana
(AUY) - Get Report
added 9% to $9.87;
Eldorado
(EGO) - Get Report
added a little over 8% to reach $10.64; and
New Gold
(NGD) - Get Report
rose 6% to $3.47.
-- Reported by Scott Eden in New York
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Scott Eden has covered business -- both large and small -- for more than a decade. Prior to joining TheStreet.com, he worked as a features reporter for Dealmaker and Trader Monthly magazines. Before that, he wrote for the Chicago Reader, that city's weekly paper. Early in his career, he was a staff reporter at the Dow Jones News Service. His reporting has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Men's Journal, the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, and the Believer magazine, among other publications. He's also the author of Touchdown Jesus (Simon & Schuster, 2005), a nonfiction book about Notre Dame football fans and the business and politics of big-time college sports. He has degrees from Notre Dame and Washington University in St. Louis.
