Gold: After The 'Fear Trade'
Gold is a reactive market, not a leading one. It reacts to, among other things, the sentiment generated by the much larger debt market, currency market, and this month the stock market. The spike higher that occurred on October 11/18, was a 'fear-trade' resulting from the weakness in equities. Now that it is starting to look like "it was just a correction, not the end of capitalism", gold is going back to a more normal behavior. In this piece, we look at how gold is returning to its more usual correlations with the dollar, interest rates, and inflation expectations.
The Dollar
Long-term, gold has always had a strong negative correlation with the dollar. And as chart 1 highlights, the trading today in both the dollar and in gold is very similar to that of the 1998-2001 period. In the late-90s, the dollar had been trading in a range, and gold was carving out a wedge from which it broke lower as the dollar appreciated. The same is happening today with gold dropping out of a wedge as the dollar appreciates.
One thing that is different this time is that in 1999, as gold was dropping, the IMF suddenly restricted its gold sales which caused gold to shoot higher by nearly 30%, almost overnight. Gold immediately continued its fall, but from a much higher price. If the IMF had not done this, gold would likely have continued dropping at the same slope and ended up much lower. Since something like that is unlikely to occur today, we think gold will travel lower from here as the dollar continues to rise.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4216880-gold-fear-trade