Precious metals are holding stead as of mid-morning on Thursday as we near the end to what has really been an uneventful week. To be fair, precious metals have not fared too poorly through the first 4 days of this 5-day trading session, but they have also not done extremely well either. Tomorrow will bring about the weekly jobless claims report and, believe it or not, it is being touted as the most significant piece of economic data made public this week. That alone should tell you how quiet things have been for much of this week.
In case you missed it, the last few days of last week played host to a good bit of economic activity. On Friday, the market waited with anticipation for the release of the latest employment figures for the United States for the month of October. Seeing as September’s employment report showed monthly job creations somewhere in the neighborhood of 250,000, it was not too surprising that the expectations of experts were that October saw at least 230,000 new jobs added to the economy. Unfortunately, and much to the dismay of many, last Friday’s October employment report showed that, in reality, only about 213,000 new jobs were created. While this figure is nothing to scoff at, the fact that it fell so short of expectations was enough to force the Dollar and US equities downward to close the week. As you might have guessed, that data also provided precious metals with a little bit of a boost.
Unfortunately, by the end of the day this Monday, more than half of the gains made by gold and silver on Friday had been parred.
Slow Week Sees Investors Focusing on Key Outside Markets
On the whole, this week has been very quiet and more subdued than usual. The reason for this is due to the fact that not only hasn’t there been much economic data to talk about, there also haven’t been too many geopolitical developments for investors to discuss either. While, normally, this might bode poorly for gold and silver, this week it has come to the aid of metals and has played a major role in stopping the decline of spot values.
Tomorrow will bring about the weekly jobless claims report for the United States, but even that will more than likely have a negligible impact on the market. Though this week has been slow, the Dollar as well as US equities have remained near their record-high levels and are still continuing to trend upward for the most part. So long as this is the case, it is going to be extremely difficult for gold and silver to make any gains worth talking about. Even if gains are made, it is going to be difficult for metals to retain them.