The gold and silver markets continue to dwindle as they have finished April in the red. This was the third consecutive month for gold price to fall and the second consecutive month for silver. So far May doesn’t present any evidence to a shift in this downward trend. During last week there were several reports that came out and may have influenced bullion traders. The U.S manufacturing PMI increased to 54.8%. This news may have helped rally energy commodities and U.S stock markets, but trade down a bit gold and silver. U.S initial jobless claims sharply declined to 365k according to its latest report; this news may have also adversely affected precious metals prices via the strengthening of the U.S dollar. Finally by the end of the week the U.S non-farm payroll report came out and showed a modest gain of only 115k in April. This news may have been among the factors to drag down oil and U.S stock markets while trading up gold and silver . By the end of the week, gold slightly fell by 1.14% and silver by 1.88%.
Here is a short recap of the developments in gold and silver for April 30th to May 4th 2012:
Precious Metals Recap:
Gold slightly declined during last week by 1.14%; on the other hand, during last week the average price reached $1,652.12 /t. oz which is 0.20% above the previous week’s average price of $1,648.8 /t. oz. Gold price finished the week at $1,645.2 /t. oz.
Silver price, much like gold, decreased on a weekly scale by 1.88%; furthermore, this week’s average price reached $30.61/t oz which is 0.97% below the previous week’s average $30.91/t oz.
During last week, the average daily percent change of gold slipped by 0.23%; silver edged down by an average daily rate of 0.62%.
In the following chart are the shifts in bullion, which were normalized to 100 to the end of the previous week – April 27th. Metals have had a slow paced downward trend during most of the week; by the end following the disappointing U.S labor report both precious metals bounced back.
The second chart presents the daily percent shifts of bullion (or in other words the shifts around the trend). Precious metals prices mostly declined during the first four days of the week only to rally on Friday; their daily percent changes ranged between nearly 1.5% gain and 2.0% loss.
For further reading: