Gold continued to bounce around the key $645 level in Asia on Monday.

That puts the metal 1.5% higher from the start of last week, against a drop in London's FTSE100 stock index of 9 points and a fall in Wall Street's Dow Jones index of nearly 90 points.

Gold failed to hold either £330 or €500 per ounce by the close of Friday's session. But last week's sudden surge through key levels in the Dollar price was outstripped by a 2% rise in gold prices for both Sterling and Euro investors.

All told, gold completed its third week of rising prices. On the futures market, gold for April delivery fell more than $3 per ounce Friday but still traded above $650 – a level identified by many chart-watching technical analysts as crucial to the progress of gold's long-term bull market.

Gold did pull back sharply from Thursday's 8-month highs on Friday. But "after a pretty substantial move in recent days, it's not surprising to see a correction," as Stephen Briggs, economist at SG Corporate and Investment Banking noted.

"The bias of the market is clearly still bullish."

Moreover, "the underlying fundamentals that are driving the price are all still there," as the CEO of Newmont Mining Corp. – the world's second largest gold miner – said in an interview in Davos, Switzerland late last week.

Gold-mine supply is in decline "longterm" he told Bloomberg. "The real story is the monetary characteristics of gold."

That's precisely our view here at BullionVault – long-term declines in gold mining supply are meeting a resurgence in gold's popularity as investment defence against weakening world currencies.

To read our take on the current gold market in full now, click here for the 5-page PDF...