The high volatility of gold and silver prices during Thursday and Friday resulted in gold and silver only slightly rising during the week compared to last week’s prices: Gold rose by 1.85% and silver by 0.94%. The highly anticipated FOMC meeting ended in a whimper as Bernanke and other FOMC members decided to keep the policy unchanged. This news came on Wednesday as a surprise because many had expected the Fed will start tapering QE3. As a result during the next day, gold and silver sharply rose by 4.73% and 8%, respectively. On Friday, however, both precious metals corrected and tumbled down by 2.7% for gold and 5.9% for silver. In the U.S several reports came out and showed mostly progress: in the U.S jobless claims increased by 15k to reach 309k; existing home sales spiked by 6.5% to reach an annual rate of 5.39 million in July; Philly Fed index sharply rose in September from 9.3 to 22.3 – this signal the U.S manufacturing conditions are progressing at the faster pace. In India, the demand is falling, which may have also curbed down the rally of precious metals during the week.
Here is a short review of the latest developments in precious metals prices between September 16th and September 20th:
Precious Metals Recap:
The price of gold rose by 1.85% last week; further, during last week, the average price reached $1,327.40 /t. oz which was 1.71% below last week’s average rate of $1,350.46 /t. oz. Gold ended the week at $1,332.60 /t. oz.
During last week, the price of silver, even less than gold, increased by 0.94%; conversely, the average weekly rate was $22.08/t oz, which was 2.82% below last week’s rate $22.72/t oz.
During last week, the average daily percent changes of gold were 0.397%; silver had an average daily change of 0.287%.
The chart below presents the shifts in precious metals rates, in which they are normalized to 100 as of September 13th. Gold and silver prices spiked on Thursday only to tumble down on Friday.
The second chart shows the daily percent developments of bullion prices (or in other words the changes around the trend). Silver and gold sharply fell during the week. Gold and silver prices daily percent changes ranged between 8% gain and 5.9% drop.
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