gold, page-49319

Gold holding up well despite strong dollar. There's been movement into gold as a "safety" play on stock market pullback. I got out too early. Look to get back into gold on a pullback.

For the week ending March 19, speculators (large and small) were net long 57.7k contracts of gold. That was up 10.7k from the previous week and the highest net long in 3 weeks, but historically still not high. Commercials were short by a ratio of 2.9:1 and were net sellers. That's the smallest short:long ratio the commercials have had since the week ending November 27, 2018 and it preceded a big move up. Swap dealers were short 1.5:1. Total open interest declined by 16k to 514k.

Friday's CBOE put/call ratio was a surprisingly low, 0.89 despite the fact that the Dow lost 460 points and the S&P dropped 54. The 10-day average of the put/call ratio is now the lowest since January 3. By itself this suggests more downside, but it's never good to go with a single indicator.