Gold Spot Price Open: $1,370
Gold Spot Price Close: $1,363
Change in Gold Spot Price: -$7
Silver Spot Price Open: $20.23
Silver Spot Price Close: $19.65
Change in Silver Spot Price: -$0.58
A slightly better than expected weekly jobless claims report worked against precious metals all day, and both gold and silver posted losses. When all was said and done, gold managed to lose close to ten dollars while silver had more sizeable losses which approached 70 cents. Platinum and palladium both managed small gains on the day, with both metals picking up around 5 dollars apiece.
Large Load of Employment Data Dealt
Yesterday saw the US economy be delivered some good news as the ISM non-manufacturing data for the month of June came back much more positively than expected. To keep it short, Wednesday’s report showed that the US services sector, which is the largest sector of the overall US economy, is showing signs of nice growth as expectations for service sector growth were handily defeated by yesterday’s figures. This was good news for the US economy, but somehow did not take too much of a toll on precious metals spot values.
That changed a bit a little after markets opened on Thursday thanks to a weekly jobless claims report that showed a larger drop in claims than was expected. Officially, first-time claims for unemployment benefits fell by more than 15,000 to bring the seasonally-adjusted average to 254,000 claims. This was good news, but it wasn’t all good on Thursday as the Labor Department revised last week’s claims upward by 2,000.
The 4-week moving average of jobless claims, which is often viewed as the most reliable snapshot of the labor market, ticked downward by roughly 2,500; this is yet another good sign for the US employment sector.
In other news, the payment processor ADP has finally released its private-sector job growth report for the month of June. It must be noted that, while this report is important, it is often only viewed as a precursor to Friday’s Labor Department analysis on June’s job growth. With all this being said, the ADP report stated that more than 170,000 new private-sector jobs were added to the economy during the month of June. Expectations were for job growth in the 150,000 range, so it is easy to see how this report handily beat the mark. Still, it will not matter much if Friday’s report comes back weaker than anticipated.
Global Markets Stabilize
Also not helping precious metals at all today was the fact that global stock markets have stabilized a bit and are appearing more normal than they have been in the past few weeks. Naturally, the BRExit vote has had a lot of fallout and is something that has caused a lot of nervousness across the global marketplace. Though that nervousness has not gone anywhere in the past few days, we are seeing investors calming down a bit. For gold and silver, this is not good news because precious metals tend to thrive during times of economic and geopolitical uncertainty.
While we have seen losses today, it is important to remember that a good majority of the momentum is in the hands of precious metals still. No one has any idea what the future holds for European economies and, as an extension of that, the future of interest rates in the US, and until some sort of clarification arises, expect metals to continue to do well.
Wrap-Up
Thursday offered up some new economic data and saw global markets calm down a bit, but the fact of the matter is that investors are as unsure of what the future holds now as they have been for the past two weeks. With some luck, tomorrow’s Labor Department report on June job growth will help clear things up for investors, but that is not very likely
