Gold ends moderately lower but silver ends marginally higher
Gold prices ended the U.S. day session modestly lower on Tuesday, 04 February 2014 pressured by a rebound in the U.S. stock market and a firmer U.S. dollar index. Silver ended with marginal gains.
April gold traded in a consolidative pattern near the $1250 per ounce level and eventually settled with a 0.6% loss at $1251.60 per ounce.
March silver dipped to a session low of $19.26 per ounce in morning floor trade but managed to recover back above the unchanged line. It brushed a session high of $19.48 per ounce and settled with a 0.1% gain at $19.43 per ounce.
Traders and investors worldwide are still jittery over the situation with some emerging market currencies being in turmoilalthough those troubled smaller currencies were generally seeing good behavior on Tuesday. The past couple weeks have seen investor risk appetite markedly decrease, and that's been bullish for gold and U.S. Treasuries, but bearish for the equities markets.
The feature in overnight trading was a stock market sell-off in Asia and Europe, led by Japan's Nikkei stock index being down over 4%. Some very weak U.S. manufacturing data Monday pushed the U.S. stock indexes sharply lower, and world stock markets followed overnight.
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Today's economic data at Wall Street was limited to the December factory orders report. Factory orders declined 1.5% after increasing a downwardly revised 1.5% (from 1.8%) in November. The consensus expected factory orders to decline 1.7%. The durable goods data were revised slightly higher, but still left a lot to be desired. Orders fell 4.2%, which was slightly above the 4.3% decline reported in the advance release. A large portion of the decline was a result of a sharp drop in transportation demand (-9.7%), which was mostly the result of a 16.9% decline in defense and nondefense aircraft.
The recent spate of disappointing U.S. economic data now puts even more importance on Friday's monthly U.S. jobs report for January. The early forecasts are for the key non-farm payrolls figure of the employment report to come in at up around 190,000 in January.
The Chinese Lunar New Year holiday has China on holiday early this week. That is keeping Asian markets somewhat subdued.
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