e mini gold and silver traded on ACE system of CBOT not sure how good the volume or spreads are between bids and offers compared to open outcry pit contracts traded on Comex Division of NYMEX exchange
Seth, Do you know of a retail (web-based / direct access) broker that allows gold trading through Comex? Who is your broker?
gold futures trading on the big contract traded at COMEX there are plenty of brokers including my former firm RCG I do not think you can trade COMEX gold or silver on computer like you would e mini sp you might have to enter orders via phone to broker if you mean trading the gold and silver ACE products electronically my broker should offer that ( Interactive )
Thanks Seth. I'm with IB too, and they offer the mini gold ACE contract (YG). But the spreads are wide and volumes thin. As far as they know they don't offer the COMEX contract. Thanks for the info about having to phone in an order for those contracts.
Apart from buying gold stocks, how can I make money if the price of gold goes up? I would like to buy the big (Comex traded) gold contract, but IB does not offer this. The mini gold contract has fairly large spreads, and doesn't trade too often. Is there an ETF or HOLDrs that is made up of gold stocks?
The mini's aren't going to make it. Just trade the big contract, it's only $100 per point per contract. Today was a fairly big move for GCZ2, $3.00 whole dollars. yee-haw!!
Anyone trading the minis on Gold - or are you saying Gold isn't even worth trading - I find best gold leverage is in the XAU stocks especially high beta ones
Yes, Gold stocks move at ratio of about 5:1 verses the spot. But you can get similar leverage just by trading the futures contract. Futures provide a more favorable margin requirement than do equities. This is important when a Fund is managing it's margin obilgation down to the penny, unlike equities. If you're restricted to just trading Equities, then Gold shares are the way to go.
... i forgot to add, if you want leverage stay way from the XAU and follow the HUI. Yes there are a few stocks that cross over between the two, but the HUI is an index of "unhedged companies." These are the companies that have the greatest sensitivity to the pure price of the spot. For example the XAU has PD as a component. PD is more of a Copper play than a pure AU play. There really is not that much difference between XAU and HUI, two or three stocks at the most, but there's difference nonetheless.