Gold Spot Price Open: $1,158
Gold Spot Price Close: $1,174
Change in Gold Spot Price: +$16
Silver Spot Price Open: $14.92
Silver Spot Price Close: $15.07
Change in Silver Spot Price: +$0.15
Gold and silver moved backwards to close out the week, but losses were marginal and light enough for both gold and silver to have eeked out weekly gains. When all was said and done on Friday, gold gained more than 15 dollars while silver added more than 15 cents. Platinum and palladium also lost on Friday, with both metals accumulating losses of about ten dollars apiece.
US Employment Figures Miss the Mark
There was a good bit of employment data dealt this week, but none was more important than the Labor Department’s non-farm payrolls report for January. In case you missed it, the early parts of the week brought about additional employment data from the United States. On Wednesday, ADP announced that the private-sector job growth came back posting gains of more than 200,000. A day later, the Labor Department announced that weekly jobless claims rose by 8,000 while the 4-week moving average of claims increased by 2,000. Judging by this data, investors were not necessarily expecting to see that January produced robust non-farm payrolls growth.
In the lead-up to today’s data release, market experts and investors alike were anticipating that about 190,000 new jobs were created last month. This is a modest growth expectation compared to the 200,000+ jobs that are typically expected. When the data was released, it showed that barely more than 150,000 new jobs were added to the US economy last month. Though this is not the most impressive figure in the world, a bright spot that can be taken away is the fact that the overall unemployment rate has fallen to 4.9%.
Royce Mendes, of the Bank of Canada, commented on today’s seemingly mixed-bag data by saying, “Today’s below consensus payroll figure doesn’t change the fact that they’ve been growing at a solid pace recently. The data today appears to offer something for Fed doves and hawks alike.”
As we look forward to next week, it will be interesting to see how global investors react to today’s jobs data. It was nice to see precious metals finish out the week so strongly and will be interesting to see how metals will open up next week. For now, most are expecting that this current momentum can be sustained at least for the time being
Weaker Dollar Helps Crude Oil Recover
The final day of this week saw the spot value of crude oil move upward by decent margins thanks to a weaker US Dollar. In fact, this week as a whole was marred by poor performances on the part of the US Dollar such that this is the worst single-week display we have seen the Dollar put forth in quite some time.
Thanks to the Dollar’s weakness this week, crude oil has managed to gain some traction and spot values are moving upward as we close out this week. It will be interesting, as it always is, to see how oil opens up next week.
Wrap-Up
For yet another week, gold and silver appreciated considerably and are still holding some very clear momentum. So long as market conditions remain as stagnant and unchanged as they have been, I imagine that the story as far as metals are concerned will be the same. February is a historically low activity month, and I imagine that next week will be a bit slower than the previous two.
