Last week
Gold futures prices, week ending Sept. 2, 2016
GOLD spent three days retesting its May 2 breakout level at $1306, and managed to hold above that level until the US Non-Farm Payroll report in Friday’s pre-market.
The NFP report was disappointing – 151k new jobs in August, compared with 185k expected – and it reduced the possibility of a Fed interest rate increase in September.
Higher interest rates usually means lower prices for gold. Reducing the likelihood of a rate increase made traders look more favorably at gold and the price moved up and closed up with a tiny gain for the week.
Last week’s trades
Gold futures, Sept. 2, 2016. 60-minute bars.
Traders tend to sit and fret when they have a live trade on, but last week Nat’s gold traders could have gone on vacation and still been profitable.
The market moved back and forth across her key line ($1321) in the early part of the week, while traders waited for the Non-Farm Payrolls report on Friday.
But as the week wore on the price fell to Nat’s first buy level ($1307) and provided three good opportunities to enter at that level, the last one on Friday morning just before the report was released and the price spiked..
The subsequent move to the Pivot level was worth about $2,500 per contract. You could have placed that trade Wednesday with a market-on-close exit and still capture most of the profit. A set-it-and-forget-it trade.
Incidentally, these trades a re posted a full week in advance. You can see last week’s gold trading plan here.