The Friday Job's Curse

Yes, the dreaded curse has struck the yellow metal once again on a payrolls Friday. These volatile numbers are big market movers and today they did so again as the number came in better than expected. Keep in mind that gold has drawn strong buying support from the PREVIOUS TWO reports which their much worse than expected job hirings. Those reports gave rise to the thinking that the Fed, which by its own admission is going to be heavily relying on economic data to determine its approach to the tapering plans, was going to either slow the rate of tapering or cut it altogether.

I mentioned at that time that the weather was having a big impact on the data. The cold was a RECORD and that cannot be ignored as it makes sense that it was going to have at least some impact on those affected by it. Thus, there was a great deal of uncertainty surrounding these numbers. To draw too dogmatic of a conclusion from them was therefore unwise and premature. Even after today's numbers, I still want to see the next month's numbers to see if we are going to get a trend or these reports are just anomalies.

But for RIGHT NOW, those who were leaning heavily on the idea that the payrolls situation was quickly deteriorating and that the Fed was on hold were caught leaning way too hard to one side and got blindsided. The result - a plethora of sell orders from panicked longs.

This is what I meant when I said to be extremely careful if you cannot stop yourself from trading the metal on the Comex right now. It is just so volatile because no one knows for sure exactly what the Fed may or may not do. Everyone is guessing based on their take on the various economic reports. If they get it right - they are heroes; if they get it wrong - they are zeroes.

The mechanics of this are really quite simple - interest rates went back on the Ten Year - that brought some support ( buying support which has been missing of late) into the US Dollar and this derailed the metals.

I am also noting that once again Dr. Copper is getting hammered lower due to credit-related fears out of China. I have been beating that dead horse for some time now but copper has not been confirming the move higher across a large segment of the commodity markets. It is down nearly 4% today alone crashing through chart support in the process. Unless is can stage a quick recovery prior to the close of trading today, it is on course to put in the lowest weekly close since July of last year...

Keep this in mind particularly when you read the silver perma bulls talking about price manipulation. Silver is both a precious metal and an industrial metal and I have rarely seen it moving higher when copper is sinking lower.

More later