The multi-year MS low from 15 March 2013 held in the early April gold bullion sell-off. The week closed with both the MS and POG trending upwards which is, I believe, a necessary condition for a sustained multi-week move such as the 20 July 2012 to 5 October 2012 up move and the the 5 October 2012 to 15 March 2013 down move.
In the coming weeks, an MS relative high, first bettering the 28 March 2013 high and then second bettering the 15 February 2013 high, would be a strong confirmation of a new MS uptrend from the 15 March 2013 multi-year low. While the 21 December 2013 uptrend failed, the faith of the 15 March 2013 uptrend is still to be decided -- a break in MS below the 15 March 2013 low would confirm that MS downtrend from 5 October 2012 is still firmly in place.
The Shanghai Gold Exchange (SGE) was closed April 4th and 5th for Ching Ming festival. The SGE will be open for regular business starting 8 April 2013 for a full week of trading. On Friday AM, my view was (and continues to be):
Although I am not commenting about any co-ordinated efforts to control POG, one does need to look at POG action around the times of major closures in the SGE. The largest sell-off in the POG occurred between 8 February 2013 and 20 February 2013, a time period nicely covering the 11 February to 15 February shut-down of the SGE for Spring Festival. POG in the largely western paper gold market is not subject to normal market forces while the SGE with its physical delivery is.
The dates of the major shutdowns at the SGE to watch will be the May Day Festival (end of May 1st) and Dragon Boat Festival (June 12th) days. If will be interesting to see if POG sells off around either of these assumed one day closurers -- the SGE website is very good a publishing daily price and volume data but is horribly out of date on holiday scehdules (last schedule published is for 2011) and the like.
The Kitco Gold Survey of market participants completed 5 April 2013 has 66% of the participants bullish while 21% are bearish and 14% neutral. Taking the Kitco survey results as a contrary indicator suggests next week is more likely to be bearish or neutral.