Gold futures traded slightly lower Monday morning after Easter, with a rise in yields and U.S. stocks perhaps undercutting bullish appetite for the haven metal after a report on Good Friday, when markets were mostly closed, showed a seasonally adjusted 916,000 jobs added in March, marking the best gain since August.
Markets in Europe are closed in observance of Easter Monday and U.S. markets, which had been closed for Good Friday, looked set to offer an upbeat reaction to Friday’s jobs report weighing on demand for precious metals.
The most-active June gold contract
GCM21,
+0.05%
was off $4.30, or 0.3%, to trade at $1,724.10 an ounce on Comex, following a 0.8% gain for bullion on Thursday, the last settlement of the holiday-shortened week, pushing the precious metal back up to a psychologically significant level above $1,700.
However, some commodity experts are worried that the pervading trend for the yellow metal has been lower as yields climb and the outlook for the U.S., and global, economy, offers evidence of improving from the COVID pandemic.
“The price is still struggling to move above the 50, 100 and 200-day simple moving averages on the daily time frame,” wrote Naeem Aslam, chief market analyst at AvaTrade in a daily note.
“As long as the price continues to fail to break above the 50-day SMA on the daily time frame, the likely chances are that gold price will continue to move lower and we will not see any bullish price trend,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, May silver
SIK21,
+0.65%
were little changed at $24.94 an ounce on Monday.
Last week, in holiday-abbreviated trade, gold posted a 0.2% weekly decline Thursday and silver shed 0.7%, based on the most-active contracts.
