Gold Spot Price Open: $1,228
Gold Spot Price Close: $1,249
Change in Gold Spot Price: +$21
Silver Spot Price Open: $19.63
Silver Spot Price Close: $20.20
Change in Silver Spot Price: +$0.57
Gold and silver capped off the first full week of January in impressive fashion as both metals made substantial additions to yesterday’s small gains. When the day was through, gold gained a little more than 20 dollars while silver came close to gaining a full 60 cents.
Out of all the economic reports and news stories that were made public this week, investors placed the most value on today’s non-farm payrolls data from December. Because of recently strong US economic and employment reports investors were anticipating a non-farm payrolls increase of around 200,000 from this past December. When the data showed that there were actually only 74,000 payrolls added, gold and silver almost instantaneously benefited. In the immediate wake of the non-farms data the US Dollar began selling off while gold and silver received a noticeable boost. The weaker than anticipated jobs data also worked to reinvigorate the ongoing debate with regard to whether or not the Fed will pursue further tapering measures in 2014.
The other big report being made public today regarded China’s trading surplus as well as their imports and exports. Despite the report indicating that China’s December imports were up over 8% on an annual basis and their exports improved by 4.3%, most people viewed the report as being a bit disappointing. The biggest negative point of the report was with regard to China’s shrinking trading surplus. China’s trading surplus declined from $33.8 billion in November to only $25.6 billion in December. Compared to an expected surplus of over $32 billion it is easy to see why most investors were not overly thrilled with Friday’s report.
It is surprising that gold and silver were not able to make larger gains after such a weak employment report, but with a weekend for investors to mull over the data the upswing by gold and silver may not be finished quite yet.
