We are in the midst of a strange week in the world of economic news and other broad impulses in markets. Chief in our mind is the concern over where equities earnings are headed. Second, we have to ask where oil is headed. Both, in different ways are contingent on U.S. dollar strength.

The fundamental puzzler for gold this week is whether the drastic drop in jobs creation is the start of a pattern or an anomaly.

Many markets, gold and silver among them, sought direction before the holiday weekend, but found little ahead of the anticipated jobs report due out from the U.S. Labor Department tomorrow.

Superficially, it seems that equities fell because of yet more mixed data coming from the American economy. It’s a bit more nuanced than that.

Analysts were expecting the ADP private employment report to clock in at about 225,000 new jobs created. It came in at a respectable but disappointing 189,000.

We are faced today with end of month/end of quarter maneuvering. Investors usually rebalance their portfolios at the end of a month, and do even more juggling at the end of a quarter, which was certainly the case for equities.

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.