Gold-Futures Shorting Attacks

Gold has suffered a sharp pullback over the past couple weeks, stoking much bearish sentiment. While a variety of factors fed this selloff, the precipitating catalyst was a gold-futures shorting attack. These are relatively-rare episodes of extreme selling specifically timed and executed to manipulate gold prices lower rapidly. Traders need to understand these events, which are inherently self-limiting and soon bullish.
Gold-futures shorting attacks are very real, with telltale volume and price signatures unlike anything else. I’ve studied them for many years now, and have written extensively about them in our newsletters as they occur. But it’s critical to realize these rare events are only responsible for a tiny fraction of all gold selling. The vast majority of the time gold selloffs are driven by other far-more-normal factors, not shorting attacks.
These isolated anomalous episodes are often cited as proof the gold price is actively manipulated. But whether that’s true or not, gold-futures shorting attacks can only explain tiny sporadic swaths of gold-price behavior. When they occur their impacts can definitely be outsized, but these are always short-lived. That’s because the huge selling necessary to execute a shorting attack is far too extreme to be sustained.
Gold-futures shorting attacks are naturally a subset of gold-futures trading, which dominates short-term gold prices. Gold-futures speculators enjoy a wildly-disproportional impact on gold levels for a couple of key reasons. The American-gold-futures-derived gold price is the world’s reference price. So whatever the futures speculators as a herd are doing greatly affects popular psychology among gold traders globally.

This post was published at ZEAL LLC on May 5, 2017.