Gold Spot Price Open: $1,276
Gold Spot Price Close: $1,269
Change in Gold Spot Price: -$7
Silver Spot Price Open: $17.83
Silver Spot Price Close: $17.59
Change in Silver Spot Price: -$0.24
Gold and silver finished the day on Wednesday in the red after the yellow metal managed to strike a 3-week high during the overnight hours. When all was said and done, gold lost about 7 dollars while silver lost in upwards of 25 cents. Platinum and palladium also finished the day downward, but palladium was the bigger of the two losers after dropping more than ten dollars. Platinum only lost a dollar or two.
New Home Sales Data Misses Mark, Still Drags on Metals
Today big headline-grabber was new homes sales data from the month of September. Even though September’s data missed expectations, the year on year growth we learned of today was strong enough to push metals lower after what really was a great day on Tuesday. According to the US Commerce Department, new home sales in September rose by a little more than 3% from August. This brings the seasonally-adjusted average number of new homes sold this year to 593,000. Even though expectations were for the seasonally-adjusted average to eclipse the 600,000 mark, the data was still received positively by monetary policy hawks who want to see interest rates risen come December’s FOMC meeting.
The silver lining in all this data is that if you look at the number of new homes sold in September of 2015 and compare it to last month, you will see that September of 2016 saw 30% more houses settled on. So, while expectations might have not been lived up to, it is clear to see that the housing market has been picking up and sustaining momentum over elongated periods of time. Naturally, this lends itself to interest rates being risen before the end of the year.
Something else worth noting from today’s housing data is that the median price of a new home in September was up by more than $25,000 from the month before. This does well to highlight the fact that, while there are houses available, the houses on the market are generally priced higher and higher as the total number of houses available diminishes.
Poor Corporate Earnings Push Stocks Lower
As we have previously mentioned, this week is big for corporate earnings reports. While the first two days of this week proved to emit mostly positive reports, Wednesday painted a different picture. Led by Apple, which is seeing slumping iPhone sales hurt the tech company’s bottom-line, today’s batch of corporate earnings reports from the 3rd quarter, truthfully, missed the mark.
Crude oil prices are also lower today and that is doing precious metals no favors whatsoever. The price of a barrel of crude oil finally slipped back below the $50 threshold after a few consecutive days above that threshold. We are once again seeing doubt spread with regard to whether OPEC can effectively limit daily oil output, though this is more of the same story that has been repeated over and over again for the better part of a year or more. Until an effective, sustained limit to the daily output of crude oil can be reached, the price of crude oil will continue to be beaten down by a crude oil supply that is overly plentiful at the present moment in time.
Wrap-Up
All things told, Wednesday was a fairly eventful day across the global marketplace, but mostly in the United States. For gold and silver, the upbeat housing data was enough to sink spot values and more or less revert gains made on Tuesday. As we look ahead to the last few days of the week, there will be more corporate earnings reports as well as the all-important Q3 GDP data from the United States.
