Gold held in a tight range on the international wholesale market early Tuesday, trading back down from $1240 to last night's two-session low of $1232 an ounce as world stock markets caught up with Wall Street's late fall.

Commodity markets also fell. The US Dollar rose. Crude oil lost 1.5% to $76.60 per barrel.

"Gold's price action [on Monday] was quite bearish," says the latest technical analysis from Scotia Mocatta.

The bullion bank notes how the Dollar Gold Price yesterday recorded "an outside day" on its candle-stick chart, starting above Friday's finish but ending beneath Friday's low.

Also spotting "key reversals in riskier assets such as the Euro and the S&P500," today's market-note from Japanese metals conglomerate Mitsui agrees that "the yellow metal [could have] put in a short-term top."

"We could be forming a topping pattern but...it is early days and nowhere near formed yet," says Phil Smith at Reuters Technical in Beijing.

The People's Bank of China today acted on its weekend promise of "greater flexibility" in the Chinese Yuan, raising its target exchange rate to the Dollar by 0.2%.

Gold priced in Yuan slipped to a 1-week low beneath CNY 270 per gram, almost 2% below Friday's new all-time record.

The US Dollar meantime pushed both the Euro and Sterling down to 1-week lows on the currency market.

UK and Eurozone investors wanting to buy gold today saw the price recover one-third of Monday's 1.9% drop, trading at £842 and €1008 per ounce respectively.

"The World Cup, Wimbledon and the emergency budget...Market professionals have plenty of excuses to sit on the sidelines at the moment – and they are taking it," says the FT's Alpha blog, noting that London's most actively traded stock on Tuesday morning was Stanelco, "a sub-penny share bioplastics group that recently had to go cap in hand to its shareholders for a cash injection."

Ahead of the weekend's G20 meeting in Toronto, Tuesday meantime brought the UK's new coalition government's emergency budget, plus the start of the Federal Reserve's two-day meeting on US monetary policy.

"With most analysts focused on the first rate hike coming in the first or second quarter of 2011, it is not going to be too long before the wording changes," says Steven Barrow, chief currency strategist at Standard Bank in London.

Holding US interest rates below 0.25% for the last 18 months – and driving the real rate of interest 2% below zero after inflation – the Fed has repeatedly vowed to keep rates "exceptionally low...for an extended period."

"Not only do we think that the euro zone debt crisis can help keep yields low on a global basis," says Standard Bank's Barrow, "but the US economic data is looking the worse for wear right now – and that too could mean lower rates for longer."

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