Gold

Optimism returned to the equities markets ‘round the world and with it brought renewed strength in the U.S. dollar.

That combination spelled trouble for gold.

What is there to say when equities are struggling to find direction, oil is down, the U.S. dollar is flat, U.S. Treasury yields are down on the 10-year, and it’s Friday?

Despite powerful headwinds from a revived U.S. dollar, traders involved in regular floor action bid up the price of gold robustly today. We’ll have to wait for the final close this afternoon to see if gold can keep itself above the crucial 1200 per ounce mark in the late session in New York.

Gold traders could not decide which way to bid gold today, and so seemed to go on autopilot, allowing the U.S. dollar to do the work. Silver and the other two precious metals followed suit.

The best news for gold today is that it did not have to rely on dollar strength to add a few more bucks to its value. More good news is that it crossed some technical thresholds and appeared to be eyeing the crucial 1200 mark.

After the hubbub over the possibility of an announcement of an interest-rate increase in the previous two weeks, since the March FOMC meeting ended, gold has been the beneficiary of a diving dollar.

Gold is about $6 off its high for the day now in late afternoon trading. Any gain the yellow precious metal has seen for the day is due to a weaker dollar. In fact, without dollar weakness, gold would have been off by about a third of a point, instead of showing a substantial gain.

The lack of regular trading follow-through should be noted by gold bulls.

The VIX fell today, although you wouldn’t know that volatility had decreased given today’s movements in markets, which seem fairly extreme.

However, as we mentioned yesterday and will reiterate today, the usual first reactions to Federal Reserve statements often are quickly “corrected” as other analysts and investors  pile into the scrum.

The Fed has (partially) spoken. The markets are reacting, and they like what they hear. In fact, the markets seem to have adjusted very quickly to the dropping of the word “patient” from FOMC language, an alteration to the text we predicted, as we did its replacement with similar verbiage.

Here is the heart of the matter in the statement:

If you are expecting the unexpected from the FOMC meeting, as they say in New York, fuggehdaboudit. The Fed is not inclined toward sudden or ill-considered thoughts, at least on the official newswire. (What is said extramurally by semi-rogue, generally non-voting members is, of course, another matter altogether.)