by Alasdair Macleod, GoldMoney:
After failing to break the $1300 level, gold backed off to find support at $1280, and silver dutifully eased as well. From last Friday’s close, after an $11 fall that day gold traded sideways to end up $1 higher on the week at $1283 in European trade this morning. On the same timescale silver rose three cents to $15.37.
Comex volumes have been generally light in a week when Monday was a public holiday in the USA for Martin Luther King Day. The dollar has also been in a holding pattern as the next chart of its trade weighted index shows.
Our third chart updates the technical situation for gold.
A note of caution perhaps should be introduced. This is shown in our next chart, of gold’s open interest on Comex. The February contract is running off the board, which normally leads to a fall in open interest. Instead, it continues to rise strongly.
Time will tell. In other news, Hitachi has pulled the plug on a nuclear project in North Wales because it has become uneconomic. The relevance here is for silver, the vital ingredient for solar panels. It appears that the cost of renewable energy has fallen significantly below that of nuclear, which is why solar farms are springing up everywhere.
With estimates of a slight decline in mine production for 2019 and escalating demand from the solar industry, silver looks cheap. To help quantify the opportunity, our last chart shows the gold/silver ratio.
Currently standing at 83.7, silver is still reflecting the massive bear market relative to gold since its price peak in 2011, when it hit $50. Could silver be the next palladium, which has tripled on acute physical shortages since 2016?
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