Gold Spot Price Open: $1,189
Gold Spot Price Close: $1,193
Change in Gold Spot Price: +$4
Silver Spot Price Open: $16.87
Silver Spot Price Close: $16.69
Change in Silver Spot Price: -$0.18
Precious metals ended the day mixed after President-elect Donald Trump held his first press conference since the Summer, but have a somewhat bright future to look forward to. When all was said and done, god ended up adding 4 dollars while silver finished the day having lost more than 15 cents. Platinum and palladium both finished the day moving downward, however platinum lost only a few dollars while palladium lost more than 10.
Trump Press Conference Takes Top Billing
The big news of the day, and perhaps the only news story worth talking about, was Donald Trump’s first press conference since July. Though we have all seen the president-elect react to different news stories via his social media accounts, we have not had the luxury of hearing Donald Trump speak (apart from his acceptance speech) since he won the election all the way back in November.
Investors were anxious to hear what Trump had to say mostly because they were hoping his words would etch out and elaborate on his economic policies as well as where he saw the US economy going in 2017 and beyond. Unfortunately, today did not bring about much in the way of tangible information and investors were left, as they usually are, to speculate about what Trump’s words really meant.
Instead of anything specific, Trump remained as vague as ever throughout the whole of his address. Market analyst at RJO Futures Phillip Streible commented on what happened today by saying, “I think markets were really wanting information on what the economy is going to look like in 2017 and they didn’t get that. Without a clear idea on economic growth, I think equities will continue to suffer, which is why I am bullish on gold.”
As we have been saying all along, the general uncertainty surrounding a Donald Trump presidency is something that lends itself to precious metals fairly dramatically. Investors hate uncertainty, and during these times it is common to see them flock to safe-haven gold and silver in lieu of other, riskier assets. Currently, we are beginning to see safe-haven demand pick up some speed. Helping that along is the fact that both equities in the US as well as the US Dollar have been on a rally since the early parts of this past Fall. In the past week or so, we have seen the USD and equities cool off to some extent, and this has been helping prop up precious metals spot values. How long this type of action will continue is tough to say, but we are comfortable in saying that it will continue so long as Donald Trump shies away from getting too specific with regard to economic and fiscal policies.
Looking ahead to tomorrow and the rest of the week, investors will once again gear up for the weekly jobless claims report. We have recently seen weekly jobless claims decline, and are approaching 100 consecutive weeks where the seasonally-adjusted average number of claims have remained below 300,000 so it will be interesting to see if tomorrow brings about a continuation of that impressive streak.
Wrap-Up
As was mentioned earlier, the biggest news of the day came in the form of Donald Trump’s press conference. The rest of the week is shaping up to be mostly quiet, and this very well might work out for precious metals. Gold hit a 6-week high during the day on Wednesday and has been looking like a solid performer ever since the New Year. Barring and shocking, unexpected news in the coming days few people would be surprised if metals continued to hold their ground.
