Gold, silver, and mining stocks declined once again in tune with my previous analyses.
The war reached its loudest point yet over the weekend, and gold fell into it once more. That much is now familiar. What matters today sits underneath the headlines, in the rate market, where the one thing that lifted gold last week is quietly being taken away.
Go back ten days. A soft jobs report, 57,000 against more than a hundred thousand expected, pulled the odds of a September rate hike down toward half and handed gold its bounce off the lows. That was the whole of the rally. It was never about the war, and it was never about safe-haven demand. It was a rate story, a brief window where the market thought the Federal Reserve had room to ease. That window is closing. The oil spike out of the Strait has pushed inflation expectations back up, and the market has priced a September hike back toward two thirds. The way one analyst framed it captures the shift: the weak payrolls number drained the rate-hike bets out of the market, and the re-closing of the Strait is putting them back. The reprieve that lifted gold is being revoked, and the metals are turning lower again.
Look at what the oil is doing to gold, because it cuts twice. Over the weekend, the United States struck Iran across three nights, hitting more than three hundred targets in a week, and Iran hit back at American bases in five Gulf states. Iran then declared the Strait of Hormuz closed. A year ago, that combination would have sent gold vertical. Instead, gold sold off, because the market no longer reads the Gulf as a reason to buy the metal. It reads it as a reason to buy oil, and higher oil means higher inflation, a firmer Fed, and a stronger dollar, which is the exact chain that has driven this decline. So the same conflict that denies gold a safe-haven bid also produces the oil that takes back its rally. The war works against gold from both ends now.
The price is doing what that backdrop demands. Gold has given back Friday's bounce, silver is leading the way down, and the whole sector is rolling over together. Friday's move up, when physical buyers stepped into the selloff and the mining stocks, and FCX reached the levels I had flagged, was the corrective pause I described it as. Today, the trend reasserts.
Please note that gold futures are holding at their rising support line based on July lows. Once this level is taken out, the decline is likely to accelerate. And then even more so once gold breaks to new 2026 lows, which could happen as early as this week (no promises, though).
In silver’s case, we see something similar, and the implications are the same.
The dollar sits where it has sat through all of this, on its breakout above 100, and it does not need to do much. It is holding while the metals break, and every failed rally in gold is one more confirmation of it. As long as the dollar holds that line, the pressure on the sector stays in place.
Please note that USD’s rising support line is below the current price and it wasn’t touched. It wouldn’t be odd if we saw a move back to it before another bigger rally starts – similarly to what we saw in the first half of June.
All in all, it looks like our profits are going to increase once again shortly.
As always, I will keep my subscribers informed.
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Sincerely,
Przemyslaw K. Radomski, CFA