Gold bulls have been reminded again that it’s hard to put the dollar down for too long.
Despite a clear distaste for more rate hikes among Fed officials and Wall Street doing its best to ignore trending inflation, the dollar rallied on Thursday, recouping all it lost in three previous sessions and more.
With the mojo back in the greenback, gold’s four-day sprint came to a halt too, as the yellow metal hit a new 2-week high just shy of $1,900 an ounce before settling lower.
Gold’s most-active futures contract on New York’s Comex, December, settled down $4.30, or 0.2%, at $1,883 an ounce after soaring to $1,897.90 — a peak not seen since Sept. 27 when it was still in the $1,900 territory.
The spot price of gold, more closely watched by some traders than futures, was at $1,869.65 by 14:30 ET (18:30 GMT), down $4.71, or 0.3%, on the day. The session peak for spot gold was $1,867.96, keeping its typical $30 discount to futures.
The US Dollar Index, or DXY, which pits the greenback against six other currencies, hovered at just under the session high of 106.54, up 0.6% on the day. Prior to this, DXY had been on a downtrend over three days, after a 11-month high of 107.35 a week ago.
The dollar rose despite Fed officials showing an aversion to raising rates in November even as the US inflation was higher than expected for a third month in a row. September consumer prices grew by an annual rate of 3.7%, the same as in August, and higher than the 3.6% forecast by Wall Street economists, data from the Labor Department showed.
“Profit taking hit gold after a hot inflation report reinvigorated the bond market selloff,” said Ed Moya, analyst at online trading platform OANDA. “After the CPI report, gold traders quickly realized that gold wasn’t going to rally above the $1,900 level.”
The dollar also rose as US bond yields rose their most in a day since July 27. Yields, benchmarked against the 10-year Treasury note reached 4.708%, climbing 2.46% on the day. Prior to this, yields had mostly slid, after hitting a 16-year high of 4.892 on Friday.
