Revisiting precious metal mining stocks and precious metals as hedge, diversifiers and safe-havens: a multidimensional scaling and wavelet quantile correlation perspective

Abstract

We test whether precious metals and their mining stock counterparts are hedges, diversifiers or safe-havens against equity markets. We resort to multidimensional scaling and wavelet-based quantile correlation method to examine the association between precious metals, indices of precious metal mining stocks and equity market over both quantiles and frequencies. Our results indicate that the white precious metals and the mining stocks of gold and silver are potential diversifier assets. We also find that gold maintains the exclusivity of being both hedge and safe-haven against equity market. The results drawn have important implications for investors and managers operating at different time horizons in the equity market.