00:08Hello and welcome to a brand new edition of The Big C, your one-stop destination to demystify
00:13all the commodity, crypto and currency trade. I'm Manisha Gupta and on the show today I will
00:19be joined by Sunil Kashyap. He is director at Finmat and Carlos Mirai is head of agriculture
00:24commodities market research at Rabobank. But before we do that let me get you up to speed
00:30with the action on the market front. The stocks on Wall Street, well they closed in green as tech
00:36stocks led gains. Dow added 130 points while the Nasdaq added 175. Investors also are assessing the
00:43latest Fed minutes that show that there is a sharp divergence in policy outlook. Tepid cues also seem
00:50to be coming in from Asia as China, Hong Kong, Taiwan markets remain closed for a lunar new year holiday.
00:57On the commodities front it is the crude oil prices which has surged four percent overnight
01:02marking the strongest advance since late October driven by the fears that the U.S. military
01:08intervention in Iran could be immense. Talks also between the two sides have so far remained
01:14inconclusive. With Iran saying that it has reached a general agreement but Washington on the framework
01:20of a potential nuclear deal. While the Vice President J.D. Wan said that Iran has failed to
01:26address U.S. red lines and President Donald Trump has reiterated that a military force remains an option.
01:34Meanwhile it is the gold prices which slipped to around $49.60 an ounce remaining choppy after
01:40reiterating or retreating rather from late Jan record levels as markets continue to assess the
01:46latest FOMC minutes. The January meeting notes showed that the Federal Reserve officials were split
01:51with some favoring a pause in further rate cuts. For now while easing could resume later in the year if
01:58inflation improves that is. Joining us then is Sunil Karshap, he's director at Finmet. Sunil hi thank you so much
02:04for
02:04joining in. First of all your sense with all this geopolitics because the market seems to be believing
02:08that while there is gain in crude oil prices some buying intangible commodities and safe havens
02:15safe havens perhaps could come back if the situation in Middle East deteriorates.
02:21Yes we've certainly seen a very volatile market. You know we saw the highs earlier of $5,500 on gold,
02:28$114 on silver and we saw a pullback in gold down to even $4,600 and silver down to about
02:35$65. But in the
02:37last few days especially related to geopolitics we've seen a pickup in in demand from people who
02:45are willing to look at flight to safety. You've seen silver move all the way back from $66 to around
02:52$80 right now and you've seen gold pick up from $46.50 to around above $5,000 this morning especially.
03:01So there is a
03:02lot of concern out there regarding the political situation and geopolitics and what's going to happen
03:09in Iran and I think that's getting reflected in the recent move up of precious metal prices.
03:16Sunil when it comes to gold what is it that's going to work for that commodity as you mentioned the
03:21kind
03:21of volatile moves that we've seen for this one. Is it going to be geopolitics, it's going to be debt
03:26concerns, central bank buying, strong investment buying that we've seen in most of 2025. What is
03:32the cues that you're working with now for 2026? All of the above. So I think all the factors you
03:38mentioned are really reinforcing for investors that gold is a stable strong buy and you're seeing that
03:49becoming very pervasive amongst the investor community. More and more people are getting into
03:54gold. They're increasing their allocations towards gold and really building up a higher percentage
04:00of gold in their portfolio. A lot of those people actually are looking at physical precious metals
04:06holdings rather than financial products because the concern they have is they're concerned about the
04:11financial markets, they're concerned about anything to do with uncertainty and so they'd like to have
04:18something solid physical with them and that's why what you are seeing is a rush towards buying
04:23physical commodity and buying gold, silver and recently even we've heard about cop people buying
04:29physical copper because they feel that that's the next big thing. All right that's going to be a bit
04:35difficult to buy with the kind of tonnages that we speak there but sticking to gold for now would you
04:40advise buying at these levels or do you think investors, long-term investors can wait for further dips from here?
04:48I think Indians are the best investors. They've done the right thing always which is that they buy gold
04:54as a diversification, they buy it incrementally over phased over a period of time usually related to
05:01weddings or social events but basically what it does is you keep buying every few months so that you get
05:10an averaging price so I think that's going to carry on. I think the important thing is even though gold
05:17prices have gone up for example in the last one year about 40-50 percent it still remains a good
05:24buy
05:24because it still remains a good store of value in these uncertain times that we live in.
05:30How are you also looking at silver? Very very volatile and more and more people I speak to tell me
05:34that
05:34they would rather prefer gold over silver going forward from now because silver has perhaps done
05:39what it wanted to do. Yeah so just to reiterate silver went up from $25 all the way to $115
05:49and then
05:49came back and now it's trading at $80 so it seems very volatile and what you found is the reason
05:55behind
05:55that was there was a huge speculative surge up so the comment you made is true I think from some
06:01people
06:01who came in from a speculative point of view looking for short-term gains and they I would say got
06:07burnt
06:07when it went up and it came off suddenly so I think a lot of those short-term investors are
06:13selling down
06:14their positions we're seeing that getting reflected in the futures positions being wound down we're seeing
06:20that also in terms of ETF selling of silver so some of that selling is taking place but the interesting
06:27trend we're seeing is demand for physical silver at the retail level still remains quite strong you know
06:36we polled the major refineries around the world recently to find whether anybody has capacity to
06:43to make silver kilobars and the earliest you can get a silver kilobar if you place an order now
06:50is probably in six or eight weeks all the refineries in the world are full up in terms of
06:56uh their capacity to produce these products which is focused more on the retail market so what it
07:03tells us is that the retail demand for silver remains solid I think people have some of the
07:11people have moved away from gold to silver because it's more affordable than gold so rather than buying
07:16three or four grams of gold you buy one kilo uh or half a kilo of uh silver and so
07:22I think that's
07:23something that is becoming a trend uh and we do see that uh carrying on for some time and maybe
07:30underpinning the silver prices oh sure buying kilos versus grams definitely does look like a good idea
07:36to some uh I also want to talk to you about the margins that the exchanges did hike today morning
07:42we have
07:42seen uh nsc mcx uh come down with margins yet again as we see some stability or rather the
07:49range that uh we've seen in gold and silver kind of get narrowed and that's exactly what we seem to
07:54be looking at the international markets as well do you see those volumes come back now the margins have
07:58started to perhaps stabilize yeah i think i think what happened when the margins went off is a lot of
08:04people closed their positions because they couldn't manage the the um the the margins and also it happened
08:10at the same time when the stock market was correcting so i think that hasn't had an impact um yes
08:16i mean
08:17i think the lower margins are going to help people who still believe in in the precious metal story to
08:22come back into uh into long positions and maybe leverage long positions so yes that's definitely going to be
08:29helpful fair point that as always lovely talking to you very very insightful and i hope to speak to you
08:35very soon yet again but with now with that now we are slipping into a short break on the other
08:40side
08:40we will be joined by carlos mehra head of agri commodities market research at rubberbank
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