Gold prices finished a bit higher on Monday after tumbling to their lowest level in three weeks following Friday’s surprisingly strong jobs report, which helped send Treasury yields and the dollar higher to the detriment of the yellow metal. Price action
Gold for April delivery
GC00,
+0.19%
GCJ23,
+0.19%
rose $2.90, or nearly 0.2%, to settle at $1,879.50 an ounce on Comex. On Friday, prices for the most actively traded contract settled at their lowest level since Jan. 10 after falling 2.7%, the biggest one-day drop since June 17, 2021.
March silver
SI00,
-0.56%
SIH23,
-0.56%
declined by 17 cents, or nearly 0.8%, to $22.237 an ounce after falling more than 5% last week.
April platinum
PLJ23,
-0.31%
shed $5.70, or 0.6%, to $974.60 an ounce, while palladium for March delivery
PAH23,
-1.79%
fell by $39, or 2.4%, to $1,579.40 an ounce.
March copper
HGH23,
-0.49%
settled at $4.035 a pound, down 2 cents, or 0.5%
Market drivers Gold was “left licking its wounds,” said Craig Erlam, senior market analyst OANDA, after sliding almost 5% from its highs towards the end of last week.
Gold was “already looking quite overbought and was struggling for momentum on its most recent surge and so was potentially primed for a correction but the U.S jobs data certainly finished the job,” he said in a market update. See: Jobs report shows blowout 517,000 gain in U.S. employment in January Prices for the precious metal had surged above $1,900 an ounce and remained there for most of January on the prospect of the Federal Reserve soon ending its policy of interest rate hikes to curb persistently high inflation, said Rupert Rowling, market analyst at Kinesis Money. However, the “massively positive jobs figures…delivered the shock that gold investors were fearing as the strong state of the world’s largest economy gives the Fed plenty more room to continue its policy of rate hikes without fearing triggering a recession,” said Rowling, in a daily report. “With more hikes now likely, gold has suffered due its lack of yield making it less attractive at times of rising interest rates.” Read: How a hot jobs report ‘moved the goal post’ on interest-rate expectations Both the dollar and Treasury yields jumped in response to the jobs data, which helped to weigh on gold prices late last week, as the U.S. economy added more than half a million jobs last month, while previous monthly data were revised higher. In Monday dealings, the ICE U.S. Dollar Index
DXY,
+0.71%,
a gauge of the buck’s strength against a basket of rivals, was up 0.7% to 103.61. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note
TMUBMUSD10Y,
3.647%
was up 9.8 basis points to 3.63%. Check out: How the U.S. dollar could put this stock-market rally to a big test