So far, this week has not brought about too much in the way of markets-moving economic data. With as much data as was made public last week, this shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise either. Unfortunately for gold and silver, the lack of news is really only pushing spot values further downward. As it stands, metals have more or less conceded all of the gains that they made on the final day of last week.
In case you missed it, the last two days of last week brought about a good deal of economic data. On Thursday, the market was paying attention to the latest European Central Bank meeting and everything that came along with that. Much to the dismay of many, however, last week’s ECB meeting did not bring about any policy changes and yielded a more dovish statement from president Mario Draghi. Still, there is a widespread belief that that ECB will soon have to do something in order to combat a slew of stagnating economic across Europe.
On Friday, the all-important US employment report for October was made public and mulled over by global investors. Because September’s report showed job additions somewhere in the neighborhood of 250,000, most analysts were expecting October’s employment report to yield much of the same. When the figures were made public, however, expectations that around 230,000 new jobs were created in October were shattered by actual figures showing job additions only around 213,000. As you could have probably guessed, this news boded well for metals and saw them end an otherwise poor week on an upbeat note. By Monday, however, more than half of the gains made on Friday were conceded and metals were back to trading in the red.
Slow Week Does Gold, Silver No Favors
As of midday on Wednesday, it is plain to see that there really isn’t much economic data for investors to look over and/or talk about. Yesterday was a military holiday in many parts of the world, so that meant that a slow week of trading slowed down even more. Gold and silver did not necessarily benefit from yesterday’s slow day of trading, but they also did not suffer any major losses either.
Equities in the US, however, downticked a little bit on Tuesday as a result of higher-trending European equity markets. European stocks were trading upward mostly due to the fact that so many corporate earnings reports came back better than expected. Highlighting these corporate earnings reports was Vodafone’s third-quarter earnings, which handily beat the expectations of analysts.
As we look ahead to the final few days of the week, I would not be at all surprised to see things remain as slow as they have been for the past few days. The attention of investors will be drawn to Friday’s weekly jobless claims report from the United States, but barring any shocking figures, that report will not have much of an impact on the marketplace.