Gold: ‘Catch Me If You Can’ — Bulls, Bears Dare Each Other In Tight $15 Race

investing.com:

It’s what happens to gold when uncertainty grips the market either way.

And uncertainty is at its height after the U.S. jobs report for August suggested the Federal Reserve will sit pretty at its Sept 20 decision on rates while keeping open the option of raising rates once — or maybe twice — before the year is out.

Since the latest non-farm payrolls surfaced a week ago, the spot price of gold —  more closely watched by some traders than futures — has moved just about $15 an ounce, going from a settlement of just below $1,940 on Sept. 1 to hover at $1,925 on Sept. 8.

The same $15 play is what the market needs to crack in order for a new direction to emerge. Paramount to the bears in gold now is a push of the spot price beneath the key $1,915 support. For the longs, it’s a clear break above the $1,930 resistance. 

Charts by SKCharting.com, with data powered by Investing.com

Sunil Kumar Dixit, chief technical strategist at SKCharting.com and a regular contributor of commodity technical readings for Investing.com characterized it this way: 

“Catch me if you can … that’s the dare the bulls and bears seem to be making at each other with gold stuck in a super tight range of $15 now.”

The reason for the directionless market, of course, is the lack of compelling data and drivers to move the needle on either inflation or gold since the August payrolls numbers. The odd thing is with less than two weeks to the next Fed decision on rates, this range might actually hold.

There is one caveat, though, for this: The US dollar.  

The Dollar Index hit six-months of 105.125 this week. Typically, dollar strength weighs on gold, explaining in part the yellow metal’s weakness over the past week. 

According to Dixit’s reading on the Dollar