Francesco Trevisan

Gold Market and Investment Banks: an Empirical Study on Long-run Gold Market Equilibrium Francesco Trevisan

Bottom line of this work is the awareness that gold investment demand is on the rise due to several features making this metal a profitable investment during negative economic periods. Therefore comes the need to forecast its futures price movements in a more accurate way, considering actors (and factors) whose importance has recently grown. In particular, purpose of the research was to throw light on the role Investment Banks cover in gold derivatives' market as major actors in developing and issuing this form of investment as well as direct speculators, understanding whether and in which manner their action can explain gold long-run price fluctuations. The empirical analysis was carried out building a Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) model relating gold price (GP) to several independent variables. The final model obtained adds Gold Lease Rate (GLR) and Volume of speculative investments from Banks(COTcom) to the traditional variables used to explain gold price, demonstrating, with the 87,13% of variance explained, that the influence of Investment Banks in gold's price is a real phenomenon both from the supply and demand side of the market.