Gold & Silver Prices | Weekly Recap 19-23 December

During this passing week, gold and silver prices had a slow week after they recorded one of their worst performances in 2011 a week earlier. The U.S. GDP growth rate in the third quarter was revised down again and may have influenced commodities traders to trade commodities down; on the other hand, the sharp rise in the housing starts in the U.S., may have helped rally commodities and stock markets at the beginning of the week. I speculate, this news items along with a modest correction to the sharp falls from the previous week may have been among the key factors to affect the development of gold and silver prices during the week. According to Bloomberg, during the past several days there has been a decline in holdings of precious metals’ backed ETFs to reach the lowest level since November 16th. If this trend will continue it may further pressure down gold and silver prices in the weeks to come.    

Here is a short review of the changes in gold and silver prices during the week of December 19th to December 23rd 2011:

 Precious Metals Prices Weekly Summary:  

table weekly gold price and silver price- 19-23 December 2011

Gold price slightly rose during the week by 0.51%; furthermore, during last week’s average gold price of $1,6018 /t. oz was 0.60% below the previous week’s average price of $1,618 /t. oz. Gold price finished the week at $1,606 /t. oz.

Silver price, unlike gold price, moderately declined during the week by 1.98%, and this week’s average price reached 29.16/t oz which is 2.90% below the previous week’s average $30.03/t oz.

During the week, the average daily percent change of gold price inclined by 0.10%; silver price on the other hand declined by an average daily rate of 0.39%.

In the following chart are the silver and gold prices that were normalized to 100 to the beginning of the week – December 19th. As presented in the chart below, gold and silver prices started the week with sharp gains that followed with a moderate downward trend for the rest of the week.

weekly gold price and silver price chart 19-23 December 2011

The second chart shows the daily percent changes of silver and gold prices (or in other words the price changes around the trend). It presents the sharp rise of gold and silver prices on Tuesday that followed with less than 1% daily change for the remainder of the days in the week.

weekly gold price and silver price chart 19-23 December 2011 percent change

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