Gold was enjoying a solid spring rally until a couple weeks ago, nearing major upside breakouts. But its nice advance has crumbled since, really weighing on sentiment. Gold fell victim to a rare major short squeeze in US Dollar Index futures. The surging USDX motivated gold-futures speculators to flee rather aggressively. But this will likely prove a short-lived anomaly, after which gold's assault on highs will recommence.
Gold's seasonally-atypical weakness over the past couple weeks is very important for speculators and investors to understand. It had nothing at all to do with fundamentals, but was completely driven by the hyper-leveraged gold-futures traders. These guys have long been fixated on the US dollar's fortunes, looking to its benchmark US Dollar Index for trading cues. That can slave gold's price to the dollar at times.
6 weeks ago, gold slumped to a major seasonal low of $1310 the day before the universally-expected 6th Fed rate hike of this cycle. The gold-futures traders fervently believe Fed rate hikes are very bearish for gold, so they usually sell leading into FOMC meetings with potential hikes. This has happened before every Fed rate hike of this cycle. The theory is higher US rates boost foreign investment demand for US dollars.
The ironic thing is modern history proves the opposite! Fed-rate-hike cycles are bearish for the US dollar and bullish for gold. The last cycle ran from June 2004 to June 2006, where the Fed hiked 17 times in a row for 425 basis points. Despite those aggressive and relentless rate hikes, the USDX still slipped 3.8% lower over that exact span while gold rocketed 49.6% higher! Clearly, futures specs' theory is sorely lacking.
The Fed's current rate-hike cycle out of extreme zero-interest-rate-policy lows got launched in December 2015. Gold was hammered to a 6.1-year secular low leading into it, as futures specs were absolutely certain higher rates were bearish for gold and bullish for the USDX. Yet again they were proven dead wrong, wrong, wrong! As of the middle of this week, gold is up 23.0% since then while the USDX fell 5.5%.
You'd think after some market thesis fails to work over and over again for decades, traders would try something else. But not futures speculators, they are a stubborn lot. So leading into every likely Fed rate hike, they bid up the USDX and dump gold. Then immediately after those rate hikes the dollar fails to surge and gold doesn't plunge, so they reverse those excessive trades driving the dollar down and gold up.
So like clockwork after the Fed's latest rate hike in late March, gold started rallying as gold-futures specs bought back in. Gold enjoys a strong seasonal spring rally in April and May, which I discussed in depth last week. By mid-April, that propelled gold within spitting distance of a major bull-market breakout. Gold regained its $1365 bull-to-date high from July 2016 on an intraday basis on April 11th, but failed to push through.
Ironically futures speculators' irrational obsession with the Fed was again to blame. That day the FOMC released the minutes from its March 21st rate-hiking meeting. Traders interpreted them as hawkish, so the USDX was bought and gold was sold. For 24 trading days in row between mid-March to mid-April, gold simply did the opposite of whatever the USDX did on every single day but one. The dollar ruled gold.
Gold managed to hover near $1350 multi-year-horizontal-resistance breakout territory for another week after those Fed minutes. But that started changing on April 19th. That day the USDX rallied 0.3%, which was actually its biggest up day in a couple weeks. USDX-futures speculators were excited because the yields on benchmark US 10-year Treasury notes crested 2.9%. Higher yields are great for the dollar, right?
For decades I've closely followed speculators' collective gold-futures positions every week in the famous Commitments of Traders reports published by the CFTC. I discuss them and their implications for gold's near-term price action in every weekly newsletter. But I haven't had the time to dig deeply into USDX futures. The analysts who traffic in that realm said USDX short positions were the largest seen in several years.
