As mentioned here earlier, a 589.60 print is all it would take to jump start gold. So far, though, the December contract has acted like that’s a leap to the moon. Far from it, in fact.  The futures actually got as high as 585.50 early Tuesday morning, close enough to our bull trigger price that just a little nudge from the oil patch probably would have done the trick. Alas, oil weakened in the wee hours, putting the kibosh on any attempt gold bulls might have made to mount even a modest rally.

Oil and gold are now joined at the hip, with swings in the price of crude determining the direction of gold rather than the other way around. That may change someday, but it is scary to imagine what might bring it about. The implication is that financial jitters at that point would have come to outweigh whatever fears we have about $100+ crude. It seems likely that a serious disruption in the flow of oil right now would have a significantly greater impact on oil prices than on gold. How much is hard to say, but imagine how global markets might react if a missile were to scuttle a tanker in the Persian Gulf. While the price of oil might rise by 50% in a matter of weeks, it’s doubtful that the POG would receive as big a jolt.

Big-picture worries aside, is there anything to suggest that the price of oil, and therefore gold, is near a bottom? A pair of Hidden Pivot supports in November Crude may hold a useful clue: The first lies at 58.51, and although it’s been breached by 16 cents, that’s not quite enough for us to write off the support entirely. If it is exceeded today by just a few more cents, though, look for the weakness to persist to as low as 55.73 over the next 3-5 weeks. Please note that an analogous fall in December Gold would bring the futures down to 539.80.

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