Gold futures are currently trading at $1724.40, which is a net gain on the day of $0.60. This after the numbers for the consumer confidence index sank from $118.8 in March to $86.9 in April.

Equities in the United States traded higher today, this in response to the easing of restrictive lockdowns in many countries. The United States has outline plans to ease the restrictions and begin to effectively reopen in phases.

Gold has truly been in rally mode. Although there have been ebbs and flows, peaks and valleys to gold pricing, during the last five trading weeks gold has managed to close higher on four of them. Although gold closed fractionally lower on the day, it did manage to gain on the week. Market sentiment has definitively shifted to a bullish demeanor.

For the last six weeks gold futures have traded from a low on the week of March 16^th at $1450 to current pricing today of $1750, a $300 price gain.

Analysts at Zaner Metals in a daily note wrote “The Fed can’t print gold”. For that matter the Federal Reserve cannot print dollars either, only the Treasury Department can do that. However, the current monetary action which includes additional purchases to their asset sheet, coupled with taking interest rates to near zero has had a profound impact on gold pricing.

April 2020 has been a month that the majority of gold traders and investors will remember for some time to come. It is truly been a roller coaster ride, where gold traded to a low of $1575 on the first of the month, and within two weeks, on April 14 hit this year’s high at $1788 per ounce.

Crude oil plummets with the front running futures contract losing 193% in trading, and is currently in the negative fixed at -$17.00 per barrel. In my 35 years of trading the commodity markets I have never seen crude oil go negative. In fact, this is the first time in history that crude oil has traded into negative territory.

It may have been gone as soon as it appeared gold above $1700 per ounce was short-lived as market forces and a changing market sentiment took the precious yellow metal $37 lower today, with gold futures currently fixed at $1694.50. The first indication that gold futures might correct occurred on Tuesday, April 14.

Today the U.S. Labor Department reported that an additional 5.25 million workers applied for unemployment benefits last week. This brings the total number of individuals applying for unemployment benefits to just over 21 million in the last month. These job losses are largely directly attributable to the current coronavirus pandemic.

On yesterday’s opening letter we spoke about the fact that even though gold traded to its highest value this year, it’s still closed lower on the day. That along with other technical factors suggested that we could be close to, or on the precipice of some type of correction in gold pricing.