Why Traders Are Buying Barrick Gold Corp (USA) (ABX) Today

Barrick Gold Corp (USA) (NYSE:ABX) shares have rallied over 2% this morning after gold futures moved higher due to the recent Syrian news, where the U.S. launched 59 cruise misses at a Syrian airfield in retaliation for Assad’s horrible chemical attack on civilians and children. Given that Russia supports Assad, some traders wonder if the missile retaliation could presage a rift between the two great powers. If that happens, geopolitical uncertainty would increase and gold might be more in demand.

Separately, some investors note that U.S. inflation is already around the ideal 2% range, and the U.S. infrastructure package hasn’t passed yet. If inflation increases substantially over the coming decade, some market participants would turn to physical assets such as gold as a safe haven. If gold commodity prices rise due to that, Barrick Gold Corp (USA) (NYSE:ABX) would benefit.

What Does The Smart Money Sentiment Say?

At Insider Monkey, we’ve developed an investment strategy that has delivered market-beating returns over the past 12 months. Our strategy identifies the 100 best-performing funds of the previous quarter from among the collection of 700+ successful funds that we track in our database, which we accomplish using our returns methodology. We then study the portfolios of those 100 funds using the latest 13F data to uncover the 30 most popular mid-cap stocks (market caps of between $1 billion and $10 billion) among them to hold until the next filing period. This strategy delivered 39.7% gains over the past 12 months and outperformed the 24.1% gain enjoyed by the S&P 500 ETFs. Our enhanced small-cap hedge fund strategy returned more than 45% over the last 12 months and outperformed SPY by more than 30 percentage points over the last 4.5 years (see details here).

Of the 742 elite funds we track, 37 funds owned $1.46 billion of Barrick Gold Corp (USA) (NYSE:ABX) and accounted for 7.80% of the float on December 31, down from 45 funds and $1.72 billion respectively on September 30. Hugh Sloane‘s Sloane Robinson Investment Management inched lower its holdings by 2% to 1.29 million shares in the fourth quarter.

The Bottom Line

Traders are hitting the buy button on Barrick Gold Corp (USA) (NYSE:ABX) due to rising gold futures, which in turn are rising due to more geopolitical uncertainty after the Syrian airstrikes. For more reading, check out ‘10 Biggest Gold Mining Companies In The World‘.

Disclosure:None