Gold and What Moves it.

Pension money invested in bullion is 'peanuts' at the moment...If 1 percent of their total assets shift to the metal, the gold market would explode. - Itsuo Toshima, advisor to Japanese pension funds (Bloomberg, link provided below)

I have maintained since 2002 that the precious metals and mining stock market would eventually erupt into bull market frenzy that would at least rival, and likely succeed, the bull market frenzy we saw in tech stocks. Part of what will fuel this frenzy is the enormous flow of institutional investor money, globally, that will eventually find its way into the precious metals and mining stock sector. Because the amount of potential capital from institutions from just a small increase in sector allocation - relative to the total size of the precious metals/mining stock sector - the price effect is potentially enormous.

There are a lot of solid fundamental reasons for this. But from a technical perspective, the total size by market capitalization of the gold, silver and publicly traded mining stocks combined is absolutely minuscule in relation to the total size of global investible institutional assets. To put this in perspective, the market cap of each of the top 15 stocks in the S&P 500 is individually larger than the total market of the entire publicly traded mining stock sector (1). Think about that for a minute. Apple has a bigger market cap than every single mining stock globally combined.