Gold A Tad Weaker on Corrective Pullback
New York (Feb 4) Gold prices are modestly lower in early U.S. trading Tuesday, with some backing-and-filling on the charts featured after Monday’s price gains. The keener investor and trader anxiety in the world market place at present continues a bullish underlying factor for the safe-haven gold market. April gold was last down $6.80 at $1,253.10 an ounce. Spot gold was last quoted down $3.80 at $1253.75. March Comex silver last traded up $0.021 at $19.43 an ounce.
The feature in overnight trading was a stock market sell-off in Asia and Europe, led by Japan’s Nikkei stock index being down over 4%. Some very weak U.S. manufacturing data Monday pushed the U.S. stock indexes sharply lower, and world stock markets followed overnight. U.S. stock indexes were stable and pausing Tuesday morning.
Traders and investors worldwide are still jittery over the situation with some emerging market currencies being in turmoil—although those troubled smaller currencies were generally seeing good behavior Tuesday. The past couple weeks have seen investor risk appetite markedly decrease, and that’s been bullish for gold and U.S. Treasuries, but bearish for the equities markets.
Market watchers are wondering more and more early this year if the very mature bull market runs in world equity markets have finally run out of gas. Indeed, the month of January was unkind to the U.S. stock index bulls. Also, the higher daily price volatility at higher price levels in the U.S. stock indexes early this year is a bearish technical warning signal of a topping process playing out.
The recent spate of disappointing U.S. economic data now puts even more importance on Friday’s monthly U.S. jobs report for January. The early forecasts are for the key non-farm payrolls figure of the employment report to come in at up around 190,000 in January.
The Chinese Lunar New Year holiday has China on holiday early this week. That is keeping Asian markets somewhat subdued.
U.S. economic data due for release Tuesday includes the weekly Goldman Sachs and Johnson Redbook retail sales reports, the ISM New York report on business, manufacturers’ shipments and orders, and the IDB/TIPP economic optimism index.
