Carat$4,270.90, a seven-week high, and silver alone in the red
At 6:03am New York gold bid $4,270.90, up 0.58% and a fourth consecutive session higher. Platinum added 1.33% to $1,753.00 and palladium 1.48% to $1,367.00. Silver fell 0.41% to $61.67, widening the ratio to 69.3.
§1A seven-week high, and the leader turns.
Gold reached its highest level in seven weeks on Thursday, and the metal that carried it there stopped. At 6:03am New York time Kitco had gold bid at $4,270.90 an ounce, up $24.70 or 0.58% on the session, a fourth consecutive advance. Platinum was bid at $1,753.00, up $23.00 or 1.33%; palladium at $1,367.00, up $20.00 or 1.48%. Silver was bid at $61.67, down 25 cents or 0.41%, the only one of the four in the red. Against the 5:58am mark this paper carried on Wednesday, $4,157.80, gold has added $113.10 an ounce, or 2.72%, in twenty-four hours.
Silver has been the engine of this rally all week, and on Thursday it was the only metal in the red. It rose 3.27% on Wednesday against gold's 1.99%, and 3.2% the session before that, pulling the gold to silver ratio down to 67.8 from about 69.0. Thursday's divergence pushes that ratio back out to 69.3, undoing two sessions of tightening in one. A rally in which the high-beta metal turns first is a rally that has stopped recruiting new money and started running on the slower leg, which is what the platinum and palladium prints look like: both are up on the day and both are up less than silver was up yesterday.
§2The gram, and the platinum ratio.
For the bench the number is the gram, and it has moved again. Fine gold at $4,270.90 an ounce is $137.31 a gram, against $133.68 on Wednesday and $130.17 on Tuesday. That is $3.63 a gram added to the metal cost of every piece in a case since yesterday morning, and $7.14 a gram since Tuesday. Platinum at $1,753.00 now stands at 41.0% of the gold price, a shade below the 42.0% this desk marked on Wednesday, because gold rose faster than platinum did.
Silver has been the engine of this rally all week, and on Thursday it was the only metal in the red.
§3Two marks, and one release.
Two things belong on the record before anyone quotes off this. First, the marks disagree by the hour: this paper's own overnight tape recorded gold at $4,276.60 at 4:58am, $5.70 above the 6:03am bid carried here, and read silver as dead flat at $61.92 rather than down. A reader working from a headline rather than a timestamp is working from a different number. Second, Friday is the event. The Bureau of Labor Statistics releases July non-farm payrolls at 8:30am, the first full read on American hiring since the Federal Reserve held on 29 July with three dissents, and June's print came in at 57,000. This desk flagged that release as a binary on 2 August and has nothing to add until it lands.
A rally that loses its fastest metal first is a rally in its late innings, and Friday decides whether it has another one. Silver turning red while gold makes a seven-week high is the clearest internal warning this tape has printed all week, because silver leads both directions and it has now led down. On the diamond lines nothing moved: NAT1 and LGD1 are both carried unchanged, the lab-grown reference again because two trackers stood 28% apart at $709 and $555 and neither can honestly be printed as a market. Quote the timestamp with the price this week, and do not reprice a case before Friday morning.
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