Gold And Silver | Weekly Recap for February 18-22

The prices of precious metals continued their downward trend and plummeted during last week mainly on Wednesday. The speculations around the future steps of the FOMC with respect to its monetary policy including the QE3 program time-frame may have contributed to the rise in the bearish market sentiment towards precious metals. In Europe, the Euro currency also declined last week along with other currencies such as the Canadian dollar against the USD. The developments in the forex markets may have also partly affected the direction of precious metals. By the end of the week, the Euro/USD declined by 1.24%; the Canadian dollar also depreciated by 1.5% against the USD. The U.S jobless claims changed direction and rose by 20k to reach 362k. U.S CPI remained unchanged in January. Philly Fed index declined again in February. Housing starts fell in January by 8.5%. These news items may have also curbed the decline of the USD. By the end of the week, gold plummeted by 2.27%; silver, by 4.65%.

Here is a short recap of the changes in precious metals prices between February 18th and February 22nd:

Precious Metals Recap:  

table weekly gold and silver February 18-22   2013Gold price plummeted again during last week by 2.27%; moreover, during said week, the average rate reached $1,588.22 /t. oz which was 2.99% below last week’s average rate of $1,637.24 /t. oz. Gold ended the week at $1,572.3 /t. oz.

Silver, even more than gold, tumbled down during last week by 4.65%; further, the average rate decreased by 5.2% to reach $29.01/t oz compared to last week’s average $30.6/t oz.

During last week, the average daily percent changes of gold reached -0.46%; silver had an average daily changed of -0.94%.

The chart below presents the developments of precious metals, as their prices are normalized to 100 as of February 15th. Gold and silver prices have tumbled down during the week.

weekly precious metals chart February 18-22  2013The second chart presents the daily percent changes of precious metals (or in other words the changes around the trend). Silver and gold had a sharp downward trend during most of last week. Precious metals rates daily percent changes ranged between nearly 0.3% gain and a 2.7% loss.

weekly precious metals chart  February 18-22 2013 percent changeFor further reading: