jeudi 18 décembre 2014

Gold and US dollar - December 18, 2014

I like gold. It's nice and shiny, rare and exclusive. Everybody, in every civilization of every part of the world likes gold. ...Well, this is not exactly true.


Smart guys in the City and Wall Street don't like gold. If you invest in gold they call you a gold bug. You have to admit that it's easier for average people to be a gold bug than an interest rate swap bug.
But I reckon that it's old fashioned to keep gold in a vault in case inflation or war happen. If you own gold, you'll get no interest payments, dividends or coupons on it. It just sits in a vault and costs you money. Or you can keep it under your bed, at your own risk, but then again it yields nothing.

Gold really lost attractiveness since it stopped being used by central banks to back currency reserves. Now, in the financial systems, it still can be used as collateral in some financial transactions, but since investors are allowed to invest collateral itself -without the need of raising collateral for their invested collateral-, might as well be something that yields interests.

So gold has been hammered since the end of the panic in 2011. It has retraced 50% of its incredible rise of the 2004-2011 period, touching for the third time $1 180, and even going as low as $1 150. This is a strong support level : 3 times touched, 3 times resisted. Now gold is hovering around this zone.


Any opinion on a future direction from here is pure speculation. The current trend is obviously still bearish, but ADX/volumes are extremely low, meaning that there is no real trend at the moment. If I had to give it a shot I'd say that gold has declined enough and will be trying to breathe some fresh air in the coming weeks. 
On a daily chart, the RSI has made higher lows and highs after forming a significant divergence with the December 1st low. Also, a new green cloud is timidly trying to take shape, with the trigger line having breached through the base line.

Of course, for a large scale counter-trend move on gold to happen (or even a change in the trend), we need to see something new on the US dollar chart. And at this point there are very few hints of any changes there. USD is bullish big time and it has once again proven the world that a couple of insignificant words coming out from a central banker's mouth are enough to immediately erase the recent pull-back. And this is happening with low volumes and ADX pointing down... What's more, the huge green cloud still looks solid despite the RSI forming a big divergence in the overbought zone.

End-of-year season is coming so I wouldn't expect any surprise for the remaining days of 2014, but 2015 might bring us some changes.

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