Exceptional, phenomenal, amazing, surprising, astounding, and almost beyond belief are only a few of the many words that can be used to describe today’s exceedingly strong upside breakout in gold futures.
Gold opened today at $2052.82 and by the close of Globex at 5:00 PM ET gold futures are up $41. At the close, the most active April gold futures contract is trading at $2095.70, a 2% daily gain.
Now that gold futures have concluded for the week and the first trading day of March, the only regular break to gold’s 24-hour trading day (excluding holidays) market participants, investors, and traders are all beginning to have a more comprehensive understanding and explanation as to why gold moved 2% in a single day. The difficulty here is that there was no unexpected fundamental report or event that led to such a tremendous price gain in a single day.
There was no single news event, expected data report, or even a black swan event (an unpredictable or unforeseen event, typically one with extreme consequences) that could simply answer this question. What we do know is this large of a move does not occur frequently.
Today’s gains were the largest daily gain since Friday, October 13. On that day gold futures opened at $1921.70 and closed at $1983.80 and gained approximately $62 in a single day.
So what we must assume is there is a high probability that today’s spike was caused by events that occurred recently that are just beginning to get digested and interpreted in a new light or different way. The one big similarity to last week’s trading range is that Friday’s gain contained the vast majority of the weekly gain. On a weekly basis, gold gained $46.30 which is a 2.26% gain on the week, of which 2% of that gain occurred today. Last week gold gained $25.30 which is a 1.25% gain on the week, of which $18.70 or 92.1% of the gain occurred last Friday, February 23.