Gold Spot Price Open: $1,259
Gold Spot Price Close: $1,264
Change in Gold Spot Price: +$5
Silver Spot Price Open: $15.23
Silver Spot Price Close: $15.68
Change in Silver Spot Price: +$0.45
Precious metals finished the week on a positive note thanks to some weaker employment data to close out this 5-day trading session. When all was said and done, gold gained five dollars while silver picked up closer to 50 cents. Platinum and palladium finished the day noticeable higher, with platinum gaining about 30 dollars while palladium moved upward by almost 20.
Employment Data Beat Expectations
Right from the beginning of the week, the biggest and most important piece of news that was going to be dealt was the non-farms payroll report from the month of February. This is always a report that is hawked over by investors, but this time it was determined to be of special importance due to the fact that US employment data has been barely hanging on recently. With most other sectors of the economy beginning to show signs of struggle, the employment situation has consistently been one that has kept the economy in good standing in the eyes of investors.
On Wednesday, the first bit of employment data was dealt in the form of the ADP private-sector jobs report. This report indicated that only 190,000 new private-sector jobs were created last month. This was not an outstanding figure, but was not overly poor either.
Heading into today, market experts and investors alike were expecting to see an additional 200,000 non-farm payrolls to have been created. When the actual data was released investors were shocked to see that February was a great month for job creation. According to the Department of Labor more than 240,000 new jobs were added to the US economy last month. The overall unemployment rate held at its 8-year low of 4.9%, though many expected it to move down after seeing how robust job creation was. Now, as you might have guessed, investors will begin speculating what, if any, policy changes will come as a result of the Federal Reserve’s upcoming meeting.
The Weeks to Come
In the coming weeks, there is going to be a lot of discussion centering around what central banks around the world are going to do to their respective monetary policies in order to spur sustained growth. First we have the European Central Bank meeting which will be held next week. After inflation data across the region really failed to impress, the overall feeling amongst investors is that the European Central Bank will have no choice but to further ease monetary policy across the region. This much is not set in stone, but judging from the actions of investors you can see that most are expecting easy money to become even more prevalent across the EU.
In the United States, we still have a few weeks until the Federal Reserve’s next meeting, however that will not stop investors from their speculation with regard to what the future holds for interest rates in the US. There is an incredibly small contingent that believes further interest rate hikes are bound to happen before we venture too far into Spring, but there is not much out there to support this. Instead, we are seeing a majority of investors convinced that interest rate hikes will be held off until later in the Spring, if not until the Summer.
Wrap-Up
At week’s end, precious metals have made nice gains and really performed well. I do not want to speak to soon, but we are beginning to see precious metals gain a bit more traction than it had over the last few weeks of February. If this momentum can be sustained into next week and is propelled by further easing in Europe, gold and silver may have another nice week next 5-day trading session.
