gold, page-2797

@goldbear77 "imo avgjoe is making the common mistake of treating PMs as commodities rather than currency -"
I'm sure @AverageJoe can - and will - speak for himself, especially as he is indeed a currency trader (Forex), perhaps the most predatory of all markets - but gold is traded as a commodity by the market makers / big banks (one and the same) and they have their ......motives, means and machinations (not illegal, I am not a conspiracy theorist). They too have to make a living...seriously, and they do it extremely artfully, having total visibility into order placement, stops, liquidity levels etc., and ignorance of this is all to our detriment, if not understood. We can gain this visibility too, but it takes hard work, and I am just learning, a mere beginner.

Ironically, while perhaps "the dark side", it's the real world of institutional trading, and it's probably even less of a black art than the TA enumerated in 1,000's of textbooks (which almost certainly never made anyone rich).

GB -We've had this discussion several times...you've said that gold can (mistakenly) be (mis)understood as a commodity since a) it's USD-priced and b) its mined, both true, and is really a currency, which is, of course, historically the case since ancient times (and so, unwillingly fallen into a trap), but it's traded as a commodity (yes, repeating myself), exactly the same way market makers trade currencies. That's why we see such repetitive, almost ritualistic price moves / reversals at key stop levels, liquidity pools, swing lows, swing highs etc, especially as the trading day moves from London to NY . Many here watch it late at night and see these LON moves up, get exuberant, and then see it often get slammed down by NY, giving way to glumness and despair (and potential bipolar disorder), without clearly understanding why this is happening , but are starting to get clued in.

This is something not widely understood, by the common retailer with their emphasis on a huge array of assorted technical indicators etc. which seem not to be effective (I strongly doubt that the market makers are looking at Stochastics, or even trend lines...they're looking at where the liquidity is). These are not conventionally or commonly understood concepts outside the world of market makers, and the mechanics of institutional order flow.

Indeed, this was intimated to me by traders from major Investment Banks for whom I worked on Wall St (Morgan Stanley, Merrill, Lehman, etc.), but I'm only seriously investigating it further now, since re-entering markets recently.
Note: I was in IT, database management, to be precise, was not a banker / trader, but you meet people....

As I say, I'm sure Joe can elaborate better than me, in fact he has, several times, but few seem to pay much attention, or give him much credibility, perhap due to ingrained biases.
Or if they find him credible, then perhaps hard to understand, and it is certainly hard to understand, because it's a different mindset, a different paradigm to what one is so used to.
But in the end, it's about understanding accumulation, manipulation (not illegal), and distribution...institutional order flow.
my 2 cents.
Cheers