Thursday August 04, 2016 10:49
(Kitco News) - The year 2016 has already topped the previous record for the amount of money flowing into exchange-traded products featuring precious metals, Barclays said Thursday.
The bank issued research on all commodity investments through the first seven months of the year, reporting combined inflows of nearly $8 billion during the last two months, taking year-to-date inflows to $50.8 billion, the strongest January-July tally since 2009. This, along with price appreciation, have pushed assets under management for all commodities to a 13-month high of $235 billion, well up from $161 billion at the end of 2015, Barclays said.
“Precious metals, and gold in particular, have been the most favored commodity sector, attracting heavy inflows via ETPs, and so far 2016 is shaping up to be the best year ever for inflows to this type of product,” the bank said.
The report covered dollar amounts of commodity flows. Commodity-wide ETP assets under management rose to $139 billion by the end of July.
“Precious metals were still the driving force behind ETPs inflows, bringing in $4 billion, $5.5 billion and $1.6 billion for May, June and July, respectively,” Barclays said. “Gold ETPs inflows picked up along with prices from May. Uncertainly from Brexit further spurred safe-haven demand in June and July.”
As of the end of July, precious metals ETP inflows totaled $26.8 billion for the year so far, already higher than the full-year inflows of $23.3 billion for 2009 and $20.2 billion for 2010, which were the two highest inflows years on record so far, Barclays said. This will mean a new full-year record, assuming there are not now big inflows in the remaining months of 2016.
Precious metals ETPs assets under management increased to $114.3 billion by the end of July, up $50 billion from the start of this year, as strong price performances added to the effects of inflows, analysts reported.