(Kitco News) – Gold prices suffered another sharp weekly decline, as an early recovery gave way to heavy selling after the Federal Reserve maintained its hawkish stance, stronger U.S. economic data reinforced expectations for further tightening, and Friday's technology-led equity rout triggered widespread liquidation across precious metals.
Spot gold kicked off the week trading at $3,994.95 per ounce on Sunday evening, and the yellow metal initially pushed higher as bargain-hunting emerged following the previous week's selloff below $4,000. The recovery gathered momentum Tuesday as Treasury yields eased and the U.S. dollar softened, carrying gold back above $4,050 ahead of Wednesday's Federal Reserve policy decision. After the Fed voted 10-2 to hold interest rates steady at 3.75% to 4.00%, with two policymakers dissenting in favor of another 25-basis-point hike, spot prices ultimately set their weekly high at $4,082.50 per ounce just before the equity close on Wednesday, before sellers regained control.
Gold came under renewed pressure Thursday after stronger-than-expected third-quarter GDP growth and elevated core PCE inflation reinforced expectations that further monetary tightening could be necessary. The metal slipped back toward $4,000 as the dollar remained supported, despite some relief from easing Treasury yields and lower oil prices.
Selling accelerated dramatically on Friday as a sharp decline in technology stocks, driven by growing concerns over returns on artificial intelligence investment, triggered broader market liquidations. Gold broke decisively below $4,000 and continued falling alongside silver and other precious metals, as forced selling and expectations for another Fed rate hike overwhelmed safe-haven demand. Spot gold ultimately set its weekly low of $3,870.25 per ounce late Friday afternoon – its weakest level in more than a year – and was trading only a few dollars above that level heading into the close.
The latest Kitco News Weekly Gold Survey showed Wall Street bulls abandoning ship after gold sank below $3,900, while Main Street maintained a narrow bullish majority bias despite the yellow metal’s price rout.
“Gold’s shine has dulled,” said Marc Chandler, managing director at Bannockburn Global Forex. “The yellow metal was near $4700 as recently as late August. The one caveat is that the once-more precious metal is below the lower Bollinger Band (two standard deviations below the 20-day moving average. Still, there does not appear to have been a capitulation trade, and assuming a push to new lows for the year, I suspect gold can fall into the $3750-$3850 range.”
“Lower,” said Adam Button, head of currency strategy at investingLive. “It's a big week with the midterms and the potential resumption of the Iran war, but I fear that Trump could lash out and escalate, leading to a severe risk-off trade.”
“I am bearish on Gold for the coming week,” said Colin Cieszynski, chief market strategist at SIA Wealth Management. “Technically, the breakdown below $4,000 is significant.”
“Unchanged,” said Rich Checkan, president and COO of Asset Strategies International. “I see competing influences this coming week. Renewed strikes on oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz may bring retaliation soon after U.S. mid-term elections. That should push oil prices higher and stoke inflation concerns… putting downward pressure on gold. But if Democrats make gains in the mid-term elections, it may very well drive uneasy Republicans to the safety and protection of gold.”
“I would treat every drop in gold prices as an opportunity to buy well,” Checkan added.
Daniel Pavilonis, senior commodities broker at StoneX Group, told Kitco News that now that gold and silver have broken near-term critical support, the precious metals may be in for a longer and deeper correction, and gold will need some indication of easing monetary policy to resume the upward trajectory of the last couple of years.
“We're still seeing some inflation,” he said. “We're seeing equities sell off. We're seeing commodities have come off, except for some of the energy sector.
Pavilonis said the market is in the midst of an unwind. “If you're looking at the charts, they don't look so hot... If you're just looking at this from a technical standpoint, not any fundamentals, it looks like we could go lower.”
As for how low the precious metals could slide, Pavilonis said the metals could be in for a deep pullback before sustained buying resumes.
“I could see silver getting as low as the high $30s,” he said. “I could see gold getting as low as somewhere around $3,000. I think it's very likely to happen into the first quarter of next year, and then maybe just base out for a little while, and then possibly move higher.”
Pavilonis said he’s seen this time and time again. “What happened the last few times when silver hit $50, when gold spikes up? We sell off afterward,” he said. “The party is over. The themes that we [saw at the early 2026 highs], the same headlines, the same stories… because of inflation, because of this or that. People need to rationalize why it went up so much. But if you go back into the archives and look at news around 1980 – before people realized it was the Hunt brothers, which was part of the story – but it was the same thing: ‘We're running out of silver, we're running out of gold, the exchanges are low, warehouses are low, inventories… And people are buying, and so you’ve got to go out and buy some gold, go out and buy some silver!’ There were almost identical New York Times articles being written about silver and gold in the run-up to 1980.”
“Now I think that anybody from the move to the upside that hasn't been stopped out, or is holding on the physical side, It's time to hedge,” he said. “You want to start collaring around positions. You want to start collaring and capitalizing on it. Because if it does go lower, then there's ways to mitigate that, put yourself in the right position where you can accumulate more. That's what I would be thinking about right now.”
Pavilonis said that if we see further liquidations across financial markets, he expects to see more selling of gold as well.
“We have this rationale to buy and hold onto the metals,” he said. “I think in the long term you're going to be right. But in the short term, the thesis can be wrong, so it's time to maybe even hedge a little bit further if you haven't already.”
This week, 16 analysts participated in the Kitco News Gold Survey, with Wall Street’s bullish belief all but evaporating after gold couldn’t hold $3,900. Only one expert, or 6%, expected to see gold prices gain ground during the week ahead, while 10, representing 63%, saw the yellow metal declining further. The remaining five analysts, 31% of the total, said they couldn’t predict gold’s direction, or expected sideways trading next week.
Meanwhile, 184 votes were cast in Kitco’s online poll, with Main Street investors once again more bullish than their professional counterparts despite gold’s steep selloff. 98 retail traders, or 53%, looked for gold prices to rise next week, while 56 others, or 30%, predicted the yellow metal would lose further ground. The remaining 30 investors, representing 16% of the total, expected to see price consolidation during the week ahead.
Next week will feature top-tier economic data and geopolitical risk events for investors to navigate, with the U.S. midterm elections and October’s nonfarm payrolls report the most significant of a raft of market-movers.
The week begins with the Monday morning release of ISM Manufacturing PMI for October. Then on Tuesday markets will receive JOLTS job openings as ongoing mid-term election voting dominates the news.
Wednesday will offer the second reading of U.S. employment with ADP’s private nonfarm payrolls, followed by the ISM Services PMI. Then on Thursday, traders will watch for the Bank of England’s monetary policy decision, along with weekly jobless claims data.
The week wraps up Friday morning with the publication of October nonfarm payrolls, followed by the University of Michigan’s preliminary Consumer Sentiment survey.
Jesse Colombo, independent precious metals analyst and founder of the BubbleBubble Report, told Kitco News that gold and silver are testing key support zones which, if definitively breached, could result in a broad capitulation in precious metals.
Colombo said Friday’s price action is somewhat unusual, because it's not driven by a clear surge in the dollar.
“You also have Treasury yields falling, and bond yields overall falling,” he said. “Oil is up, so that could certainly be a factor, but it's not really up in such an extreme way, about 2% to 2.5%. It doesn't seem like the sell-off in gold is commensurate with the rise in oil.”
“There's definitely a technical element,” he said. “I suspect there's risk aversion heading into the midterms, and also there's liquidations in tech stocks.”
Colombo said there’s also trepidation that the U.S. administration may escalate the Iran conflict.
“I've even seen some speculation that there could be some action this weekend,” he said. “A lot of times President Trump likes to kick things off on the weekend, have a quick skirmish, and then wrap it up by Sunday evening before the futures open. It's possible that there's risk aversion ahead of this weekend, like ‘sell first, ask questions later.’”
Colombo warned that negative sentiment has resulted in a snowballing of downside momentum which could soon lead to a capitulation.
“It's taking out these key support levels,” he said. “For example, on COMEX gold futures, $3,900 to $4,000 was that floor of support that I've been watching, and that was formed exactly one year ago, in October and November, that support zone. It's testing that zone, but it has not broken below it yet.”
Colombo said he’ll also be watching Friday’s close and how the new week begins.
“Does it continue to hold this zone? We're really at a critical level,” he said. “If it does indeed close below on strong volume – possibly next week – then the next support I'm looking at is around $3,500.”
“I'm not saying it will go there. I'm just saying if this current support indeed fails, the next level to watch is $3,500.”
For silver, Colombo is keeping his eye on the 45-55 support zone in COMEX futures, which was also formed during the October-November highs and lows exactly one year ago.
“That was the last area where it was consolidating and bouncing around before that big parabolic run-up into late 2025, early 2026, so I want to see how it acts there,” he said. “Plus $50, which has played such a key role going back to 1980, roughly the peak of the 1970s secular bull market in silver and precious metals, and then 2011 as well.”
“In November 2025, silver shot above that, and I viewed that as a sign of a major multi-year breakout,” Colombo said. “Now we're approaching $50 from the upside, and now it's a new support – not literally $50, but a zone around there, because you know there’s going to be all sorts of shenanigans at that level. I want to see if it's going to hold; It can go a little bit below there, a quick flush. If it holds it, good. If it breaks below, we look to the next support. But for now, it's still holding that support, so that’s what I'm banking on at the moment.”
Alex Kuptsikevich, senior market analyst at FxPro, expects gold prices to fall further next week.
“Gold has now been in a downtrend for almost two and a half months, continuing to form an almost perfect line of resistance through a series of progressively lower local highs,” he noted. “On Friday, the spot price of a troy ounce plummeted to $3,940, rewriting the lows seen since last November and breaking through the support zone (just below $4,000) that had halted the sell-off in June and July. Of the entire recent uptrend, starting from the lows four years ago to the highs in January and February, the price has now corrected by 61.8% of that rise, meaning it has reached the lower boundary of a classic correction.”
“However, we view the immediate short-term outlook with some concern,” Kuptsikevich warned. “The decline in gold is accompanied by substantial sell-offs in the stock markets; in other words, this is a typical flight from risk amid potential margin calls, with few paying attention to prices and merely rebalancing their positions to normal levels. Although gold is generally regarded as a safe-haven asset, it tends to move in tandem with equity markets during such sell-offs and only turns upwards after signals from central banks that monetary policy is shifting towards easing.”
Kuptsikevich said that while the Fed, the ECB and the Bank of Japan did not raise interest rates this week, they reinforced expectations of a December hike. “At the same time, oil, a leading indicator of inflation in the current economic climate, is approaching the upper limit of this year’s trading range, promising increased pressure on prices,” he noted. “It is clear that the inverse correlation between oil and gold seen four years ago has returned: the higher oil prices, the lower the gold prices. And we find ourselves having to dust off our original scenario for gold, which we have maintained since the start of the year, which predicted a fall in the price of a troy ounce to $3,300.”
Neil Welsh, head of metals at Britannia Global Markets, said gold prices have declined against the backdrop of technology-sector losses, higher energy prices and changing interest rate expectations. “These are overlapping influences rather than evidence of a single driver,” he said. “Gold’s safe-haven reputation does not make it immune to the market’s demand for cash.”
“The clearest catalyst for a change would be a material deterioration in US economic activity, particularly in the labour market, that leads markets to price out further rate hikes and pushes real yields lower,” Welsh said. “A central-bank pause alone is unlikely to be enough. Both the Fed and the ECB have maintained a conditional bias towards further tightening, so gold needs evidence of a genuine shift in the policy outlook, rather than simply a wait for more data.”
Welsh said next Friday’s nonfarm payrolls report will be an important test for markets. “A weak reading, particularly if accompanied by slower wage growth, higher unemployment or downward revisions to previous figures, could substantially reduce expectations of a December rate hike and create a more supportive macroeconomic backdrop for gold,” he said. “However, a single release may not be enough if inflation stays elevated and the broader economy remains resilient. In that case, any recovery could prove to be a tactical rebound within an ongoing period of consolidation.”
At the time of writing, spot gold last traded at $3,875.05 per ounce for a loss of 3.74% on the week and 3.62% on the day.
See live precious metals prices for gold, silver, platinum and palladium — in USD, CAD and 12 more currencies.
