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Pmsl

The 400k buy is mine, a top whilst there is still time :)

Gold fever sends some vintage luxury watches to the melting furnace - according to Reuters (14/06).

LONDON, June 13 (Reuters) - Omega's Constellation watch has been flashed in campaigns, movies and at the Met Gala by stars like George Clooney and ​Nicole Kidman, turning it into a symbol of luxury and glamour.

But with gold prices near record highs struck in January, some such classic watches are being melted ‌down as the value of their metal content outstrips their resale worth.

Used models by the likes of Omega and LVMH's (LVMH.PA), opens new tab TAG Heuer are most hit by the trend, according to Reuters interviews with over a dozen traders, industry experts, and investment advisers.

British dealer Jon White of Gold Traders melted down an 18-carat late-1970s Constellation in excellent condition in May, one of dozens of mainstream luxury watches he has had scrapped this year as demand for ​investment gold has risen.

"Beautiful watch. But in reality, had the customer consigned that to auction, what would they have achieved?" White, who also manages an auction house, told Reuters.

The ​gold content of the Constellation watch, one of many models produced by Swatch-owned (UHR.S), opens new tab Omega, was worth £5,750 ($7,749), 35% more than its estimated £4,000-4,500 auction value, White ⁠said.

James Lamdin, founder of Watches of Switzerland's (WOSG.L), opens new tab second-hand unit Analog Shift, said melting was "primarily happening with contemporary pre-owned and also with older vintage watches that are not already collectible."

Spokespersons for Swatch and ​Rolex said they would not comment for this story. LVMH, Richemont, Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet did not respond to requests for comment.

LIQUID GOLD

Gold prices surged to a record $5,600 an ounce in January as ​geopolitical concerns and trade worries pushed investors towards safe-haven precious metals. Gold now hovers around $4,200 per ounce, almost double its 2024 average.

The market price for used watches has not moved in the same way, however.

"I find it very sad, because obviously once something has been melted, it's gone forever," said Adrian Hailwood, a specialist in horological history.

There are no official figures showing how many luxury watches are being melted. World Gold Council data shows overall ​gold recycling in the first quarter rose 5% to 366 tonnes, while gold jewellery demand rose 31% in value to $47 billion.

Watches can hold anything from a sliver of gold to more than ​200 grams, meaning their scrap value can run into tens of thousands of dollars. In an Omega Constellation, the gold can be found in the case and the strap.

With gold expected to reach between $5,400 and $6,300 ‌an ounce this ⁠year, the pressure to dismantle some watches will continue, especially as traders that resell them must cover costs and the expense of providing a warranty.

New watches that are over-produced might also be melted down.

...article continues

You're no doubt correct Spy, it's just that I've asked a couple of leading questions which elicited zero response. So my opinion is clearly biased.

You mean like a ramper would?

The guy has access ti a Bloomberg 2/3 grand per month so work for some city org. No?

Always came across as a paid shill in my book.

Surprised this RNS hasn't sparked some acidic comment or two.

I think you mean Baldrick, not Blackrock.

REUTERS article May 28 6pm GMT+1 : Fed Chair Warsh's preferred inflation measure is cooling. A big pinch of salt is advised.

May 28 (Reuters) - One of new Federal ​Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh's favorite inflation measures came in cool again on Thursday, offering evidence for his belief that inflation is improving and against ‌the view of a growing number of other policymakers that interest rate hikes may be needed to tamp down rising price pressures.

Year-over-year inflation by the Dallas Fed's trimmed mean measure - the best-known of what Warsh referred to in his confirmation hearing as "trimmed averages" for inflation - was 2.3% in April, the Fed bank reported on Wednesday, down from 2.4% in March.

WHAT do the Indonesian stockmarket...............

More important, as traders have learned to make these sorts of plays, competition has squeezed profits. Research by Robin Greenwood and Marco Sammon, both of Harvard Business School, shows that the average stock added to the S&P 500 in the 1990s beat the index by 7.4 percentage points between announcement and inclusion. Since 2010 the average such bump has fallen below a single percentage point.

Even the most unlikely investors are getting in on the action. Norway’s gargantuan sovereign-wealth fund has $2.3trn in assets, much of it in effect invested passively. Yet it made $4bn last year through arbitrage, including around the rebalancing of indices.

Many so-called tracker funds in truth exercise far more discretion than the label suggests. This might be necessary to avoid being the “dumb money” on the other side of index-rebalancing trades. Research by Peter Molk of the University of Florida and Adriana Robertson of the University of Chicago finds that even the largest S&P 500 funds had allocations that diverged from the index by between 1.7% and 7.5% of their assets in the final quarter of 2022. This amounted to over $60bn-worth of stockpicking decisions.

The fate of any successful arbitrageur is a melancholy one. Profitable trades shrink the avenues for arbitrage that first attracted them to the market. At their very best, they help to make financial markets function more smoothly even as they erode their own advantages. There will still be money to be made for such traders in the months and years to come. But even as the importance of index rebalancing grows, the golden days of the strategy are probably over.

This is an article from the Economist 14/05. This topic has been the subject of much interest and debate in recent months to us here in GGP world. Make of it what you will.

hat do the Indonesian stockmarket, South Korean government bonds and Robinhood, an online broker, have in common? Not much, you might think. But over the past year investors in all three have quivered before the same phenomenon: the awesome power of financial indices.

The largest of these now exert a tidal pull on markets. As of 2025, around $36trn-worth of capital was in passive investment funds. These automatically track decisions by MSCI, FTSE Russell, S&P Global and the like to determine what to buy, and how much. Many trillions more are supposedly invested actively, but by “closet index-huggers”—timid managers who fear straying too far from their benchmarks.

Ironically, all this has given rise to a strategy based on discretion and guesswork. Hedge funds and other traders try to surf ahead of the wave of portfolio rebalancing generated by indices changing their weights. Some corkers are on the horizon, with buzzy and enormous firms such as SpaceX and Anthropic expected to list their shares in the coming months, and to join stockmarket indices soon after. Sadly, making money from such events is getting harder.

If markets were perfectly efficient, it would always have been nigh-impossible: as soon as an asset looked likely to enter an index, its price would adjust to anticipate tracker funds’ rebalancing. But markets are not perfect and index rebalancing is large enough to move them. Goldman Sachs, a bank, reckons $7.8bn could flow out of Indonesian stocks if the country is downgraded to a “frontier market” by MSCI in June. The share price of Robinhood surged by 16% in September after it joined the S&P 500 index. South Korean bonds’ entry into the FTSE World Government Bond index this year may drag in as much as $60bn-worth of foreign investment.

Why, then, is it getting harder to profit by trading ahead of these events? One reason is that index rebalancing rewards periods of sustained momentum. Shares that have climbed rapidly in value are admitted to indices, then bought automatically by tracker funds, giving them another boost. If you can identify one such winner earlier than your competitors, you can buy it before the bump. Provided it keeps winning, so will you.

If its momentum stalls, you will not—both because you own a stock that is faltering and because it might not now enter the index after all. In two separate months last year, index-rebalancing strategies run by Millennium Management, a hedge fund, came a cropper in this way and booked losses worth hundreds of millions of dollars, snapping long winning streaks. They did so just as momentum reversed (meaning that winners began to lose and vice versa). When momentum becomes unreliable, as it has sometimes been recently, so too are index-rebalancing strategies.

cont'd

You're in good company BC; Christine Lagarde the Head Honcho of the ECB has recently stated that everyone is Europe is in denial regarding the forthcoming Energy shock. There's this weird idea that if Trump stops dicking around tomorrow everything will be back to normal next week. It won't for many reasons.

Droverman - are you in the Baltics?

JB

KM - You think a few nods is a good example of corporate governance do you? Not sure Mr Day would agree and if you've been paying attention to GGP, they done EVERYTHING by the book, zero short cuts.

As this is a Main Board Decision I suspect it might take more than a few days to get them all together. And yes I have heard of zoom, but this is such a big decision that they'll want to see the white's of peoples eyes.

But if this week that's good too.

@TMT But is he though or is it just a lie?

You're never too old to learn stuff.

Last time I'll try and be helpful or is it?

A Cretan is a Greek from the island of Crete - is that you meant?

Will do, Rotherrby

Best

JB

Interesting how different things affect different people isn't it. I have a problem with your reports on GgpChat Rotherby, in particular the ones with the Green coloured backgrounds...

If you could make the background colour(s) as light as possible so there's more contrast that might help.

Ta

Jb

Element1 @ 17:11 - 18/05

"Then Norges Bank with 7.1m out of nowhere..."

Just for those that don't know Norges Bank are the investment banking arm of the Norwegian Government Wealth fund. They are really tough cookies to deal with - they don't just look at the investment but at the company and its processes behind it. We had 400m of their money in our corporate bond funds when I was working at a hedge fund.

If there was such a thing then these guys are Tier1 Investors - have no doubt. This is 20 year money.

I'd be very surprised if they haven't met Shuan and his team.

This is a massive gold tick for Greatland Resources.

JB