Gold and Silver Fall Slightly After Two Days of Gains

From Chris Mullen at GoldSeek.com...

Gold fell
over 1% by midday in London before it bounced back fiercely in early New York dealings
and traded just under unchanged on the day by about 10:30AM EST, but it then
fell back off into the close and ended with a loss of 0.51%. Silver fell to about $12.70 in London before it rose to find slight gains in New York above $13.00,
but it also fell back off into the close and ended with a loss of 0.54%.

Euro gold
rose above €487, platinum lost $7 to $1,283, palladium lost $1 to $362, and
copper fell over 10 cents to about $3.66.

Gold and
silver equities saw over 2% losses in late morning and early afternoon trade,
but they then rebounded in the last hour of the session and ended with about
1.5% losses.

Also
making economic news today was the ADP’s private report showing that jobs rose
a less than expected 48,000, but most are waiting for Friday’s government
report before drawing any conclusions.
Tomorrow at 8:30AM EST brings Initial Jobless Claims for 7/28 expected
at 310,000 and at 10AM is the Factory Orders report for June expected at 1.0%.

Oil had a
fairly wild day as inventory reports showed oil inventories fell 6.5 million
barrels, gasoline inventories rose 600,000 barrels, distillates rose 2.8
million barrels, and refinery utilization rose 1.9% to 93.6%. After initially hitting a new record intraday
high at $78.77 on the huge crude inventory drop, oil prices soon fell back off
and closed notably lower on profit taking as the drop seemed to be mostly due
to the fact that refineries have been coming back online and processing that
crude into to other energy products.

The U.S.
dollar index rose on better than expected Pending Home Sales data, but gains
were limited amid continued credit worries.

Treasuries
ended near unchanged as poor ADP jobs data was offset by encouraging housing
data.

The Dow,
Nasdaq, and S&P were again roiled by subprime concerns and traded all over
the place as rumors surfaced that major homebuilder Beazer may need to file for
bankruptcy, but those rumors were widely denied and worries eased from earlier
dramatic levels by the close. As a
result, all three indices ended nicely higher and the Dow closed near its high
of the day with an over 1% gain.