Gold bars are seen on display at a gold traders in Bangkok’s Chinatown. <\/p>\n
(Bloomberg) — As pictures of queues outside gold stores flooded social media over the past month, professional precious metals traders were getting increasingly nervous.<\/p>\n
Gold is \u201can overcrowded trade that\u2019s overextended by every technical metric,\u201d Nicky Shiels, head of research at precious metals refiner MKS Pamp SA, wrote to clients on Oct. 6. On Monday, as prices soared to new record highs near $4,400 an ounce, Marc Loeffert, a trader at Heraeus Precious Metals, warned that the metal was \u201cgetting even more overbought.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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The reckoning came this week. Gold prices plunged by as much as 6.3% on Tuesday, in the biggest drop since 2013, and held losses through Friday to close at $4,113.05 an ounce. In dollar terms, its $138.77 weekly drop was among the largest ever.<\/p>\n
Was it a turning point in gold\u2019s multiyear bull market, or just a dip? In Bangkok\u2019s Chinatown, the nation\u2019s gold trading hub, Sunisa Kodkasorn, a 57-year-old textile factory worker, had no doubt about the answer.<\/p>\n
\u201cGold is the best investment,\u201d she said. \u201cWe decided to gather all our money and come today because we knew prices had dropped.\u201d<\/p>\n
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She\u2019s not alone: from Singapore to the US, dealers told Bloomberg they had seen a rush of interest from people looking to buy gold as prices dropped this week. Kodkasorn\u2019s attempt to buy the dip was stymied because the size of gold bar she could afford was sold out.<\/p>\n
And another kind of gold rush is unfolding this weekend in Kyoto, where nearly one thousand professional gold traders, brokers and refiners are descending on Japan\u2019s ancient capital for the largest annual precious metal conference, which begins on Sunday. The professionals \u2014 notwithstanding their caution in the recent run-up \u2014 are similarly enthused by the gold market: attendance at the conference is at a record high.<\/p>\n
\u201cBull markets always need a healthy correction to weed out froth and ensure the cycle has duration,\u201d Shiels, whose initial note came a fortnight before prices peaked, said this week. \u201cPrices should consolidate and revert to a more measured bullish trajectory.\u201d<\/p>\n
The gold price peaked just above $4,381 an ounce toward the end of trading on Monday. What was unusual about what came next was that it was largely confined to the precious metals markets: other major markets, from equities to Treasuries to oil, were little moved on Tuesday as bullion slid.<\/p>\n
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There was no obvious catalyst for the move: some traders pointed to profit-taking by hedge funds, others said there had been selling by Chinese banks.<\/p>\n
But it was a reversal that gold specialists had been anticipating for some time, as the precious metal \u2014 after already smashing record highs this year \u2014 soared a further 30% in just two months.<\/p>\n
On New York\u2019s Comex futures market, interest in bearish put options on gold rose to some of the highest levels relative to bullish call options since the global financial crisis of 2008. The manager of one commodities-focused hedge fund expressed frustration that, despite being a long-term gold bull, he had failed to fully capitalize on the rally because he had started betting on a correction too early.<\/p>\n
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Still, it remains hard to find a gold bear among precious metals analysts whose forecasts \u2014 for the most part \u2014 have been bullish but not bullish enough over the course of the last two years. When the London Bullion Market Association carried out a survey of analysts at the start of the year, almost every respondent expected prices to rise, but none thought it could trade above $3,300 during 2025. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe expect de-risking and profit taking by investors to be met by dip buying from other segments of demand including central banks and other physical buyers, ultimately keeping reversals relatively shallow,\u201d Gregory Shearer at JPMorgan Chase & Co. said in a note this week.<\/p>\n
Yet the gold market\u2019s history gives some reasons for caution. In September 2011, when gold hit a high of $1,921 before falling back, traders and analysts who gathered that month for the annual LBMA conference were almost universally bullish. As it turned out, it would take another nine years before gold reclaimed that high.<\/p>\n
The current surge in gold has been driven by a wave of central bank buying, which accelerated dramatically after sanctions on the Russian central bank in 2022, and fears about unsustainable levels of government debt around the world.<\/p>\n
JPMorgan\u2019s Shearer highlighted the possibility that central banks will take a step back from the market as the major risk to his bullish forecasts, which see gold averaging more than $5,000 by the final quarter of next year.<\/p>\n
But the most recent leg of the rally \u2014 coming after US President Donald Trump attempted to fire US Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook \u2014 has been turbocharged by a wave of buying from ordinary \u201cretail\u201d investors, with gold shops running out of stock and more money piling into exchange-traded funds than ever before.<\/p>\n
A gold jewelry store at Zaveri Bazaar in Mumbai, India, on Oct. 17, 2025.Photographer: Dhiraj Singh\/Bloomberg <\/p>\n
In some of the world\u2019s main gold-buying hubs, there was little sign this week that the fall in prices had dented their enthusiasm. Some dealers reported less interest after a hectic two months, but others had record sales.<\/p>\n
Pete Walden, deputy chief executive officer at BullionStar, a dealership in Singapore, said his company had had its busiest day ever on Tuesday. \u201cWe had a queue before opening, with many more buyers than sellers,\u201d he said. \u201cI think many are using it as an opportunity to buy the dip.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the US, Stefan Gleason of dealer Money Metals Exchange LLC, said his company had more interest from \u201cbargain hunting\u201d buyers than it could handle.<\/p>\n
And in Tokyo\u2019s swanky Ginza district, Vietnamese student Hang Viet, who is in his 20s and has lived in Japan for about a decade, arrived at a branch of Tanaka Precious Metal Group Co hoping to buy a small gold bar.<\/p>\n
\u201cI believe gold prices will keep rising in the long run,\u201d he said. \u201cI saw the current dip as an opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n
–With assistance from Suttinee Yuvejwattana, Yusuke Maekawa, Srinidhi Ragavendran and Yvonne Yue Li.<\/p>\n
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\u00a92025 Bloomberg L.P.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gold bars are seen on display at a gold traders in Bangkok’s Chinatown. (Bloomberg) — As pictures of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":239537,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[4536,45,49,48,3242,37140,37141,7328,112914,112913,112912,7885,93975],"class_list":["post-239536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-bloomberg","tag-business","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-gold","tag-gold-bars","tag-gold-market","tag-gold-prices","tag-gold-traders","tag-gregory-shearer","tag-nicky-shiels","tag-precious-metals","tag-record-highs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239536"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239536\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/239537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}