Gold is suffering a hang-over after it’s early January highs, while the EUR/USD pair is buckling - so when gold declines, where will its bottom be?
After injecting itself with Janet Yellen’s stimulus sentiment, gold came down from its highs on Friday (Jan. 22).
And like the GDX ETF, it’s important to put gold’s recent run into context. For starters, gold is still trading below its August declining resistance line, it topped at its triangle-vertex-based reversal point (which I warned about previously ) and the yellow metal remains well-off its January highs.
Figure 1
Looking at the chart below, we can see gold approaching the upper trendline of its November consolidation channel.
Inflation will be one of the greatest upside risks for gold this year. Will it materialize and make gold shine? The report about gold in 2021 would be incomplete without the outlook for inflation . We have already written about it recently, but this topic is worth further examination. After all, higher inflation is believed to be one of the biggest tail risks in the coming months or years, and one of the greatest upside risks for gold this year . Most economists and investors still believe that inflation is dead. After all, the only way to justify the central banks’ unprecedentedly dovish actions is the premise of low inflation. And the only way to justify the buoyant stock market amid the new highs in the number of Americans in hospital with COVID-19 is the expectation of an inflationless economic recovery this year. In other words, many people forecast the return to the Goldilocks economy after the end of the pandemic .
Figure 1 - USD Index
In yesterday’s (Jan. 19) analysis , I commented on the above USD Index chart in the following way:
The USD Index is after a major breakout above the declining resistance lines and this breakout was confirmed. Consequently, the USD Index is likely to rally, but is it likely to rally
shortly?
The answer to this question is being clarified at the moment of writing these words, because the USD Index moved back to its rising short-term support line that’s based on the 2021 bottoms.
If the USD Index breaks below it, traders will view the 2021 rally as a zigzag corrective pattern and will probably sell the U.S. currency, causing it to decline, perhaps to the mid-January low or even triggering a re-test of the 2021 low.
The price of gold has declined further amid incoming U.S. President Joe Biden’s fiscal stimulus and poor economic data, which is a bearish sign. The weakness in the gold market continued last week. As the chart below shows, the London P.M. Fix declined below $1,840 last Friday (the price of the yellow metal later declined even further, i.e., below $1,830). The downward trend is a bit disturbing given the poor economic data reported last week. First, the jobless claims increased from 784,000 on January 2 to 965,000 on January 9, 2021 , as one can see in the chart below. This increase surpassed market expectations and indicates that there is a long way ahead for a full recovery in the U.S. labor market.