February 13th Weekly Silver Market Update

Precious metals are posting solid gains on this, the final trading day of the week, but are still looking at some weekly losses. For gold, this will be yet another week where a 5-day trading session saw the metal’s spot value finish worse off than where it started. Silver, on the other hand, was able to squeak out a marginal weekly gain thanks to a nice rally today.

On the whole, the week we have just witnessed was quite calm and devoid of much economic data. Though a few geopolitical developments caught the attention of the marketplace, there were very few outright economic reports to talk about. The one exception to that rule being two reports that were made public on Thursday in the United States. Looking ahead to next week, I think that things will resemble the week that has just passed thanks to an overall lack of economic data and few developments outside of Europe.

Ukraine Ceasefire Talks Emit Results

For the first time in months, the fighting across Ukraine’s Eastern half will be brought to a halt thanks to a ceasefire agreement that was reached in Belarus on Thursday. The agreement, which officially goes into effect on Sunday, will bring relative peace to a region that has been ravaged by war over the past year or more. With regard to global economic markets, the news of the ceasefire agreement sent equity markets shooting upward. Over the course of the past few days, US and European stock indexes have shot to multi-year highs. This action has limited the upward momentum of precious metals that was derived from a weaker Dollar over the past few days. It will be interesting to see if global equity markets can continue this rally as we head into a new weeks.

Another note from the talks in Belarus, it was reported that Angela Merkel, German chancellor, praised Russian president Vladimir Putin for his efforts in the talks. Putin is known to be obstinate when it comes to the fight in Ukraine, so it was particularly refreshing to hear that he is, at least for now, cooperating with those that want peace.

US Economic Data Is A Miss

On the whole, both the weekly jobless claims report and retail sales report released on Thursday were disappointing. Not only have weekly jobless claims once again eclipsed the 300,000 mark, retail sales over the course of December to January fell by almost a whole percentage point. This follows a November to December reading on retail sales that also saw a decline of nearly 1%.

The year has gotten off to a poor start for US economic data, but that does not mean things can change. The overall outlook on economic growth in the US is upbeat for 2015, so it will be interesting to see when things begin to turn around.