Gold Spot Price Open: $1,292
Gold Spot Price Close: $1,288
Change in Gold Spot Price: -$4
Silver Spot Price Open: $18.11
Silver Spot Price Close: $18.04
Change in Silver Spot Price: -$0.07
Precious metals spent most of the day losing value, but by day’s end had not moved far from where they opened. When all was said and done, gold lost about four dollars while silver lost little more than 5 cents. Platinum finished the day having lost a few dollars, but palladium managed to gain nearly twenty.
Uneventful FOMC Meeting Takes Center Stage
One of the biggest events of the week came today in the form of the conclusion of the latest Federal Open Market Committee meeting. Despite it being widely believed that the FOMC was not going to make any policy shifts, investors from all over the world tuned in regardless. Now that the dust has finally settled, we can say for sure that the FOMC has decided to yet again leave monetary policy unchanged. In fact, this meeting was so uneventful that the FOMC did not even have a post-meeting press conference.
Now, the overriding belief is that the Fed will leave interest rates unchanged until sometime in 2016. For precious metals, the fact that the Fed is proceeding with caution is a good thing due to the fact that so many investors are uncertain with regard to the direction the global economy is currently heading in. So long as there is a good amount of uncertainty present in the global marketplace, gold and silver will more than likely benefit from it.
Stocks, US Dollar Finish the Day In Positive Fashion
US Stocks rebounded nicely today after some poor corporate earnings reports on Tuesday caused most equity indexes to tumble. Better fourth quarter earnings reported by Apple helped push technology stocks forward a day after Microsoft reported very weak earnings. In fact, Apple’s earnings in the fourth quarter of 2014 were the most it had ever recorded for a single quarter. Boeing also reported profits that jumped 6.2% during the last quarter of last year. All in all, it was a good day for stocks, though that is probably a major part of the reason why metals had such a tough time today.
The US Dollar also performed well on Wednesday, edging higher against the Euro. The USD has been performing well for the better part of the past few months, but has recently seen a bit of volatility cause erratic price action. We will continue to keep a close eye on the greenback as it will more than likely continue to affect the price action of precious metals.
Wrap-Up
Looking ahead to the last two days of the week, the market will continue to analyze corporate earnings data. In addition to this, the final few days of the week will see investors focus on some employment data from the United States, including the weekly jobless claims report. With weekly jobless claims coming in at over 300,000 for the past two weeks, investors will be interested to see if claims for unemployment benefits have dropped off or not. Clearly, even without an overflow of economic data, this week has been quite active for investors.
