April 4th Weekly Silver Market Update

For the first time in nearly two whole weeks, spot gold and silver are trading sharply higher. Despite a bearish market being a mainstay for gold and silver over the past 8 or more trading sessions, Friday’s weaker than anticipated US jobs data for March flipped the script for metals. While this is the most important piece of economic data to talk about this week, it is far from the only economic report released this week.

Deflation concerns are still hovering around Europe, boosted by a falling producer price index, which was reported earlier this week. The European Central Bank held their monthly policy meeting a day ago, but it ended up having little to no impact on the market. As it stands, gold is sitting just below the key $1,300 threshold while silver is just barely keeping its head above the $20 level.

Full Week of Economic Data To Reflect Upon

This 5-day trading session was in stark contrast to last week’s, which was unusually subdued due to a lack of any major economic or geopolitical inputs. Right out of the gate on Monday investors were greeted with a number of US economic reports, most of which ended up having marginal impact on precious metals values. If anything, the early week reports made public in the United States worked against spot gold and silver.

Instead of focusing too readily on the reports released earlier in the week, investors chose instead to hold their positions until the non-farm payrolls data for March was made public; an event that happened just barely an hour ago. Officially, 192,000 non-farm payrolls were added to the US economy last month. This is a healthy number for monthly job growth, but also one that falls below market expectations which were in the neighborhood of 200,000. Realistically, the market was actually expecting to see monthly job growth beat the 200,000 mark handily due to the fact that tow high-ranking members of the Federal Reserve very recently expressed their optimism towards the US economy’s strength and the pending upswings in job growth. The weaker than anticipated job growth ended up helping gold and silver make some decent gains.

Though both gold and silver are far from the high points they realized little more than a week ago, it is encouraging to see both metals end the week trending upward. Hopefully ,as investors further digest this week’s economic data, the interest in gold and silver will continue to improve.