➡ Bullion banks are predicting a rise in gold and silver prices in the first quarter of 2025, which could indicate a positive trend for the rest of the year. UBS and Citibank have increased their targets on gold, and JP Morgan has publicly shown support for miners. The article also discusses various financial figures and market trends, including the expectation of a slowdown in non-farm payrolls and the potential for further easing by Powell. The article concludes by highlighting ongoing developments in the gold market, although the specifics are not yet clear.
➡ Big players in the market pay attention to data points, as they indicate when to buy or sell gold. These data points, whether they’re bearish or bullish for gold, create liquidity events that these players can take advantage of. Additionally, bullion banks are predicting higher prices for gold and silver in the first quarter of 2025, which could be a positive sign for the rest of the year. Lastly, the Segella mine is believed to be highly valuable, with potential for more gold deposits to be found, making Fortuna a potentially undervalued stock.

Bullion banks are raising price targets on gold and silver again in the first quarter of 2025, which is potentially very bullish for the rest of the year. Welcome to the Morning Markets and Metals with Vince Lancey. Where each morning Vince brings you the financial and precious metals news to get you ready for your day. And now here’s Vince. Good morning everyone. I’m Vince Lancey and this is the Morning Market Rundown. Okay, title tentatively, UBS and Citi raise the bar and JPM likes the miners. Referring of course to our main topics today, UBS and Citibank raise their targets on gold and JP Morgan has embraced miners, publicly even.

Okay, so let’s start with the 10-year yields are 444. Up a little bit, the dollar is 107.84. Up 14, S&P 500 is 60.85. 60.83. Up 13 and change. The VIX is 15.30. Down 18, gold is 20.65. A solid $10 higher. Silver, 32.23. Up 3 or 4 cents, depending on how you look at it. Copper, 4.49. WTI, 71.50. Natural gas, 3.66. Bitcoin, 97.850. Palladium, 9.73. Down nine. Platinum, 9.88. Up one and change. Gold, silver, 8.80. Soy corn and wheat, 10.51. 4.86. 5.94. Down eight, down four, down almost. A little over four and then down almost five.

Okay. Okay, our home page. Bunch of stories. Here are three of them. Gold lease rates explode as U.S. repatriation grows. That’s our term, repatriation. Others are now using it. We think it’s true and we think there’s more news coming out about that, although we don’t have any solid information. Founders UBS Gold Update, that’s the best report we sent out yesterday in full to founders. We’re going to discuss that today. And it’s already been sent out this morning to premium subscribers. Standard Charter says Bitcoin to 500,000, which kind of hurts me every time I read stuff by Standard Charter as they were one of the first billion banks that I followed.

But now they seem to be a Bitcoin bank. Things change. I’m a fan of Bitcoin, so I can’t cry that much. Breaking UBS raised its target to 3,000. That’s the post we sent out yesterday. There’s plenty more. We’ll come to those in a second. Okay. First, non-farm payroll is today. 170,000 non-farm payrolls are expected versus 256 in December. The slowdown is here. Okay. Well, I don’t know that it may surprise us again, but the slowdown is projected to be here. And we’ll see how the market reacts to that. If it does happen in line, how stocks and bonds and commodities act to that, because now they’re all thinking about, well, if the slowdown is here, will Powell ease again? And who knows, right? Goldman thinks, just for the record, Goldman thinks there’s definitely another two, threes, cuts coming, and other banks have pulled away from that significantly.

So Goldman has stuck to their guns for the most part. All right. UBS and the unemployment rate is projected to hold at 4.1%. I read somewhere zero hedge noted that more revisions lower are coming. So whatever the numbers were in the past, they’re going to be revised even lower. Biden, Trump, whoever. All right. So getting to the titles, UBS, the gold rush, we have four stories. So we’re just going to give you some synopses from a couple of them. UBS, the gold rush continues. Gold quoting the story. Gold reached our long held forecast of US dollars, 2850 an ounce.

And while we acknowledge the current spot price is above our fair value estimate, our house view risk case is edging closer. So we lift our forecasts to US dollar 3000 an ounce over the next 12 months. We have that. Click continues there. Next, JP Morgan likes miners, especially Fresnio. We raise our Fresnio overweight December 26, price target to 10 pounds a share, previously nine, and shift Fres to our top pick among the EMEA gold miners. And given it is trading on around the 3.5 EV to EBITDA, we also stay overweight on cost child.

I’m going to try to say that and angle of gold and see potential for both to rerate as well. EMEA, if you’re not familiar with that terminology, EMEA is Europe emerging markets. It’s basically Europe, Middle East, and Africa. But essentially it’s emerging markets. Latin American miners throw it in there as well. Next. So that’s two of them. The third one is Peak Suite, which is an aggregator of information, kind of like a Bloomberg for traders. It’s streaming. It’s a good product. We like it. Citi raises their price target. Now, they alerted us to this.

And then, well, we’ll get to that in a second. They are quoting the report. The gold bull market looks set to continue under Trump 2.0 with trade wars and geopolitical tensions, reinforcing the reserve diversification, de-dollarization trend, and supporting EM official sector gold demand, and with global growth concerns, tariff and cycle-related, set to raise ETF and OTC investment demand via Peak Suite. You can click on that and see the source. We have this report from Citi and have been holding off on it for a day or two. We wanted it because it’s a very big report.

It’s a deep dive, right? And it’s entitled, Why Gold’s Bull Market is Based on Physical Fundamentals and is Set to Continue that we will be going through it with a fine-tooth comb this weekend for premium subscribers. But Peak Suite broke it, so we have to get it out there. We guys have to know what’s going on. And in context, you know, Citi is not very public with their announcements because they are largely a commercial bank. So we’re lucky to get this report. And we have another one that we really haven’t shared because the tariffs got pulled off the table so quickly.

But they handicapped the tariffs as being bullish for gold. And although I didn’t get into the reason, they handicapped it as being bullish for gold because basically it’s a relatively inelastic product that’s going to be bought. So they said bullish because the prices at the refined end would trickle through to spot anywhere from 2% to 5% price. And we’re maybe seeing that right now. But there is a lot more going on in these markets, I think. As Zero Hetch has noted, you know, a majority of the world’s free-floating gold, gold that’s not spoken for, gold that’s not tied to one particular geographic place, is now in New York.

Why? Why? What do we need it for? And we want to go through that in more detail this weekend as well. Specifically, if you’re interested, specifically, this repatriation concept, although it wasn’t called that then, happened during COVID as well. And there were very specific, very real, very legitimate reasons for it to happen. Reasons, narratives, excuses, however you want to call it. But we were definitely on top of that because it made COMEX prices go up relative to London and made COMEX futures go into backwardation. And there were real reasons for it that were identifiable.

COVID, smelters ran down, had to shut down. There was real US demand for coin blanks, although that wasn’t advertised, but that was true. And so now, what’s the reason? Maybe there’s some coin demand. Maybe there are governments about to release, you know, a Trump commemorative gold and silver coin. Who knows, you know? But we think that we’re moving closer and closer to announcements related to, hey, we want our gold back too. So they’re not buying the gold, but we’re taking delivery of it. And if we’re taking delivery of it, that means it’s never going to be in the wild again.

Okay. So there’s some big stuff going on in gold, although we don’t know exactly what it is yet. News and analysis. These are the stories we put out in the last two days. Some of the stories found there’s January payrolls preview. You just got a taste of that. We sent that out this morning. UBS, the gold rush continues. That’s the full analysis done by them. Also, gone out this morning. JPM likes EMEA gold miners. That’s that story. Breaking UBS raises target to 3000. That was the alert that we sent to everyone yesterday.

Gold lease rates explode to as U.S. repatriation and delivery logistics grow. That’s the story I wrote yesterday. Found there’s UBS gold update and a standard charter says Bitcoin to 500,000. Be still by beating heart. Every Michael Avery of Rabobank, dissenting the facts of life, basically a geopolitical piece. That on deck on employment. You may be seeing that by now, maybe seeing it as you’re watching this. There’s the data. It is Friday. We welcome the weekend, although we’re going to be writing this weekend. Here’s the charts. Kind of busy there, right? All right. Silver is now above the moving averages, right? I keep having to delete these, but I don’t erase them permanently.

We don’t care about moving averages anymore. Gold is, well, I got to tell you, gold is, gold’s nearing overbought. Okay. So today’s data, this is all buying that has to buy. May not mean much to you, but what it means is that that’s big buying that’s been coming into the market, looking for moments of liquidity. When it’s sold off, it gets to take a couple thousand contracts down. But when it’s trading sideways and 50 contracts are trading, it just watches. So these data points like the jobs number are liquidity events. If they’re bearish for gold, that’s a liquidity event.

Thousands will be sold. If they’re bullish for gold, there will still be selling as it rallies, meaning you have this increase in liquidity around data moments. And so that’s why data moments are very important to big, big players. And I think big players are buying that. So in summary, if I’m a buyer and I’ve got a gazillion contracts to buy, and I need to buy them by like next Friday, let’s say, give them another week. I pay attention to data points because that’s when the liquidity comes in. Now, the liquidity is if the data is bearish, right, and the liquidity comes in and sells, I’m going to buy it.

I’m going to buy it because I have an order that must be filled by next Friday. I’m a broker acting on behalf of a very large central bank type of client. If the data comes out and it’s bullish for gold, well, I’m going to buy it. But there’ll be sellers along the way on the way up. The point I think the takeaway from these data moments is how quickly and how much is bought on the load. So manifesting, if you’re a technical guy, it’s like, let’s say the data comes out really bearish today, right? You’re looking for two things.

You’re looking for a V-shaped bottom, right, to be comfortable staying long or getting long. And you’re looking for a non-confirmation indicator on those lows. And you’re looking for how deep it goes. So this will be like a data event that’s scooped up, right? A data event, not a data event, a data event. Was this a data event? I don’t think it was that scooped up. So you’re looking for these V-shaped bottoms now. And if you don’t get a V-shaped bottom, I’ll explain it to you. If the market drops and goes sideways, then there is no buying interest with urgency.

They may be buying interest, but they’re like, eh, I’ll come back tomorrow. Eh, I’ll come back Monday. But if there’s buying interest with urgency, you get V-shaped bottoms. That’s the moral of the story there. Okay. So in summary, bullion banks are raising price targets on gold and silver again in the first quarter of 2025, which is potentially very bullish for the rest of the year. I’m Vince. Have a great weekend. And actually was talking with our dear friend, Dave Kranzner about Fortuna in an episode earlier this week. And play a couple of comments from what he had to say.

I think that that Segella mine alone is worth the market cap of Fortuna. And it just, I mean, I just can’t believe how much gold they’re finding on there. I mean, now they have, they have six deposits that they can mine. And they’ve got a seventh that, you know, that probably be, you know, if they’re ready to mine it, and if it, you know, and if it fits in terms of the grade, if it, if it improves their sequencing, you know, they probably start mining that next year. Then they’ve got those prospects in, in the northern part of the property name escapes me right now.

But, and I was not expecting that to be included in the, in the revised inferred resource, but it was. So, and they’ve got, you know, I think Jorge said they’ve got over 30 different targets that they, that they still want to test, at least that they know of now. So it just, it looks to me like, eventually, and again, they’ve, they’ve already, you know, they’ve already exceeded their, the production from that mill without spending money on increasing the physical size of it, right? The processing capacity. So at some point down the road, they’ll probably end up doing that.

They got to find enough resource to justify it, but I, in my mind, there’s no question they will. And then you’ve got the, the Diambasud project, and it looks like, you know, that thing could end up being more valuable than it then, you know, was thought when they acquired it. So I think if you buy Fortuna at this price level, you’re getting everything except the Segella mine for free. So to me, it’s, it’s a very undervalued stock. Well, thank you, Dave. Thank you, Vince, and thank you to everyone watching at home.

I sure do hope you had a great week. Go out there, have a great weekend, and we will see you again on Monday. Please note that this video is not intended as legal license, financial trading advice, and is to be used for informational purposes only. Please contact your financial advisor before making any decisions, and thanks for watching. [tr:trw].

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