Key points:
- Gold prices float steadily
- Quiet Holiday week ahead
- S&P 500 outworked (take that stock bros)
Precious metal is up 28% on the year so far, against a 25% gain for the broad-based index. It’s because the stars aligned (and some bad stars, too).
- Gold prices
XAUUSD ticked up Tuesday morning as traders were rolling into the Holiday week with almost no expectations. It’s been an easy few days for the bullion with mostly sideways trading around the $2,620 mark. Over the year, however, gold has outworked the stock bros as gold bugs celebrate a year of record highs and stellar performance. - The precious metal flaunts year-to-date gains of 28%, a comfortable pace to beat the S&P 500 and its 25% advance for the year. But gold saw lots of things going its way — the Federal Reserve was super aggressive in its rate cuts with a full percentage point now gone from the benchmark interest rate since September. There were also elevated war tremors in the Middle East, inflation battles and overall gloomy outlook.
- All this is now clearing up. Market participants are already assessing gold’s first moves in 2025 (it’s a quiet week anyway) as some of them are still dumbfounded by the Federal Reserve’s guidance offered last week. In a nutshell, interest rates aren’t going down as much as expected. And higher rates for longer dent gold’s prospects as a non-yielding asset. But that’s just an outlook — there’s a ton of data to come out next year that will most likely stir, shake and bake (and break?) the financial markets.
