Yesterday In Gold And Silver

The gold price didn't do much of anything during Far East and most of the London trading day on Thursday, as it sort of wandered around aimlessly within a ten dollar trading range below Wednesday's New York close.

Gold finished the Thursday session at $1,700.00 spot right on the button...up $5.70 from Wednesday.  Net volume was pretty decent...around 140,000 contracts.

However, a rally of some substance began to materialize about 8:40 a.m. Eastern time...about twenty minutes after the Comex open.  The fun ended at the London close at 4:00 p.m. GMT...11:00 a.m. Eastern time.  From there it more or less traded sideways into the close of electronic trading.

Gold's low and high ticks, which are obvious on the chart below, were $1,684.90 and $1,704.40 spot.

The subsequent rally lasted until the same 11:00 a.m. Eastern time...$33.38 spot...and that proved to be silver's high tick of the day.  Then it got sold off until noon, before trading sideways into the close.

The silver price traded down about a percent by mid-afternoon in Hong Kong...before rallying back to almost unchanged by 11:00 a.m. in London.  From there it got sold off once again, with the low price tick [$32.46 spot] coming at the same as time as the low tick in gold...8:40 a.m. in New York.

Silver closed at $33.03 spot...up a whole 12 cents.  Volume was pretty decent...around 41,500 contracts.

The dollar index closed on Wednesday at 79.82...and then traded a hair lower up until 8:00 a.m. in New York.  The subsequent rally took the index back up to around the 80.30 mark...and it hung around that number for the rest of the Thursday session...closing at 80.25.

There was little co-relation between the precious metal prices and the dollar index at all yesterday...especially considering the fact that gold and silver rallied together with the dollar index during the New York morning session.  I'm sure that had something to do with bad new on the euro front.

The silver stocks were mixed...and Nick Laird's Silver Sentiment Index closed down a smallish 0.34%.

The gold stocks opened flat, but soon rallied to their 11:00 a.m. high...in lock-step with a rising gold price.  Once that high tick was in, the stocks got sold down to just above the unchanged mark...and proceeded to trade sideways from there until the equity markets closed at 4:00 p.m. Eastern time.  The HUI finished up 0.40%.

There were no reported changes in GLD yesterday...but a rather chunky 1,258,182 troy ounces of silver were deposited in SLV by an authorized participant.

The U.S. Mint had its third sales report in a row yesterday.  They sold 4,500 ounces of gold eagles...1,000 one-ounce 24K gold buffaloes...and 25,000 silver eagles.

Over at the Comex-approved depositories on Tuesday, they reported receiving 614,504 ounces of silver...and shipped 452,643 ounces of the stuff out the door.  The link to that activity is here.

Here are a couple of very interesting charts that Nick Laird sent my way yesterday evening...and they're definitely worth sharing.  Neither needs any further embellishment from me.  All comments regarding these charts should be directed at Nick...not me.

I have a decent number of stories for you today...and I hope you can find the time to read the ones that interest you the most.