Gold And Silver | Weekly Recap for August 12-16

The prices of gold and silver took a sharp turn last week and spiked. Last week’s performance was among the best in recent months. Surprisingly, the forex market wasn’t as volatile as the precious metals market was last week. Further, US dollar remained nearly unchanged against leading currencies including the Aussie dollar and Euro, which suggests the rally of precious metals wasn’t stemmed from the changes in the forex market. This rally coincided with the poor performance in the U.S stock markets that have been falling in recent weeks. In the U.S, jobless claims fell by 15k to reach 320k; Philly Fed index tumbled down to 9.3 in August; the CPI inched up by 0.2% during July. Retail sales also edged up by only 0.2%. Finally, U.S housing starts and building permits slightly rose during July. These reports were slightly positive at best and mostly negative, which could have contributed to the rally of gold and silver. By the end of the week, gold jumped by 4.5% and silver by 14.3%.   

Here is a short review of the latest changes in precious metals prices between August 12th and August 16th:

Precious Metals Review:  

table weekly gold and silver  prices  August 12-16  2013The price of gold jumped by 4.47% last week; further, during last week, the average price reached $1,344.52 /t. oz which was 3.54% above last week’s average rate of $1,298.52 /t. oz. Gold ended the week at $1,371.20 /t. oz.

During the previous week silver price, even more than gold, spiked by 14.33%; moreover, the average weekly rate was $22.15/t oz, which was 11.46% above last week’s rate $19.87/t oz.

During last week, the average daily percent changes of gold were 0.884%; silver had an average daily change of 2.733%.

The chart below shows the developments in bullion prices, in which they are normalized to 100 as of August 9th. Gold and silver prices fell at the first few day of the week only to rally by the end.

weekly precious metals chart    August 12-16  2013The second chart shows the daily percent shifts of precious metals prices (or in other words the shifts around the trend). Silver and gold sharply rose during most of the week except on Tuesday. Precious metals prices daily percent changes ranged between 5.27% gain and 1.02% drop.  

weekly precious metals chart  August 12-16  2013 percent changeFor further reading: