Gold Spot Price Open: $1,289
Gold Spot Price Close: $1,284
Change in Gold Spot Price: -$5
Silver Spot Price Open: $17.49
Silver Spot Price Close: $17.27
Change in Silver Spot Price: -$0.22
Precious metals extended losses on Wednesday in the wake of some US economic data that was better than expected. When all was said and done, gold lost about five dollars while silver lost more than twenty cents. Platinum and palladium both lost more than ten dollars on the day, but neither metal’s losses extended much beyond 15 dollars.
US Economic Data Mixed Bag
This week was a big one from an economic data standpoint, and it really all began today with the release of the ADP private-sector job growth report. Despite it being widely expected that nearly 200,000 private-sector jobs were created last month, the actual figures showed a major miss from expectations. Officially, ADP announced that just shy of 160,000 new jobs were created in April in the private-sector. Despite the somewhat weak employment data, today’s economic data was not all bad.
It was reported earlier today that the US service sector expanded at an incredibly fast rate in April. Being largely a service-based economy, the growth of service companies is something that is very much important to investors of all varieties. All in all, the upbeat services data did well to negate the negative impact created by the downbeat employment data. After all, services make up much more of the US economy than any other sector.
For gold and silver, the upbeat data from the United States ended up pushing spot values downward. Yet again, however, even though losses were realized, the losses incurred by both gold and silver were not anything major or worrisome. There is a lot more data expected to be dealt this week, and that will pick up tomorrow with the release of the weekly jobless claims report. After today’s downbeat report regarding private-sector job growth, many investors will be looking especially hard at what tomorrow’s data has to say.
European Union Still Struggling Economically
The European Union is, by now, accustomed to weak economic data. After all, the region has been hanging by a thread for the better part of the last year and, despite the ECB’s best efforts, has seen very few signs of sustained growth. To start off the 2nd quarter of 2016 we are already beginning to see that not much has changed in Europe. Today, most European markets finished proceedings poorly thanks to an additional batch of weak data.
Like the United States’ private sector, Europe’s too saw some dismal growth through April. Adding insult to injury was the fact that retail sales across Europe also took a dive in April, marking the first monthly loss in almost 6 months. Other, smaller pieces of data were also dealt from Europe on the day, but most of them were either slightly or entirely disappointing in nature. What’s more, we are continuing to see a situation where countries like Germany are carrying the load for weaker countries such as Spain and Greece. When it comes down to it, this is really much of the same from Europe and the story really does not look like its changing anytime soon.
Wrap-Up
Wednesday saw a small pick-up in the amount of economic data being dealt, but the week was not much more exciting as a result. Tomorrow will see even more economic data dealt, and that will first and foremost come in the form of the weekly jobless claims report. Other than that, we will be keeping our eye on the US Dollar in order to see if it continues doing well throughout the remainder of the week. It will be interesting to see if precious metals can bounce back and end the week in positive fashion.