Gold Spot Price Open: $1,232
Gold Spot Price Close: $1,227
Change in Gold Spot Price: -$5
Silver Spot Price Open: $17.27
Silver Spot Price Close: $17.18
Change in Silver Spot Price: -$0.09
Precious metals spent much of the day on Monday moving sideways, but by day’s end were seen recording marginal losses. When all was said and done, gold lost about five dollars while silver’s losses were around 10 cents. Platinum and palladium, on the other hand, finished the day up, but only by about 5 dollars each.
Focus Turns to Latest FOMC Meeting
Kicking off on Tuesday and set to wrap up sometime Wednesday afternoon, this week’s Federal Open Market Committee meeting will surely draw the attention of investors from all over the world. Despite it being generally agreed upon by investors and experts that interest rate hikes are still a far ways away, the investing community will want to pay attention to this meeting nonetheless. If nothing else, the market is looking to be given some sort of idea as to exactly when we can expect rate hikes as well as how drastic those rate hikes will be.
Tying hand in hand with the delayed nature of rate hikes in the US was a report released today saying that the US services sector emitted its worst performance in more than half a year during this month. According to the Markit report, “Service providers attributed higher levels of business activity to supportive domestic economic conditions and an associated upturn in incoming new work. However, in line with the trend for output levels, the rate of new business growth eased to a three-month low in October and was softer than the post-crisis high recorded in June.” Despite the undeniable fact that the US economy is performing well, it is reports like these that the Fed will point to as contributing factors behind delaying interest rate hikes.
Crude Oil Continues to Fall, Doesn’t Help Precious Metals At All
For the past two weeks or more, the price of crude oil (per barrel) has been on an almost straight downward trend. While this news is great for people putting gasoline into their cars, it isn’t doing other raw commodities any favors. In fact, the declining nature of crude oil may continue to limit the upward movement of gold and silver.
Luckily, however, physical demand for precious metals is reportedly on the rise across Asia. According to an official report from Hong Kong, China imported more gold from the Special Administrative Region during September than it had in any of the previous 6 months. This, added to the fact that economic reports from China last week came back far better than expected, is leading many to believe that Asian economies might finally be emerging from their extended slump. Adding to the good news (for Asia) was the fact that the Japanese Yen was able to make some more gains against the US Dollar today. Though the USD Index trended downward today, it is still hovering near its recently achieved 4-year high.
Wrap-Up
As we look ahead to the duration of the week, the eyes of the investing world will shift almost entirely to the FOMC meeting that will kick off tomorrow. There really aren’t all that many geopolitical happenings catching the attention of investors, and that explains the fairly quiet nature of the global market atmosphere over the past few weeks. In addition to focus being placed on the FOMC meeting itself, investors will also be paying close attention to the type of impact, if any, the meeting has on equities as well as the USD.
