Gurus have a bad habit of telling their subscribers exactly what they want to hear, so perhaps it’s a good time to consider how ugly things could get if gold really falls apart. There’s always that chance, right?  From a Hidden Pivot perspective, little technical damage has been done so far. However, looking at the intraday charts in a more conventional way, there’s no denying the corrective pull of the 1331.00 low recorded in mid-November. That’s where I think bulls will make their stand, and we can use it as a minimum downside target for now. Keep in mind that that would represent a correction of just 7% from December’s all-time high.

Note as well that when Gold was trading near those highs, none of us would have considered a correction of 10% to 15% anything special. If this one achieves the latter threshold, it would imply a low near  $1217; if the former (i.e., 10%), $1289. My gut feeling is that $1331 will contain the move,  but I’ll be able to make a better guess once I’ve seen how the futures behave after they’ve created a bearish impulse leg on the daily chart.  As noted here earlier, that would require a breach of the 1352.00 low recorded in late November.  Alternatively, we should remain open to the possibility that the worst has already been seen. If so, the evidence would begin to accumulate with a 1389.50 print today, and it would double with a print at 1397.60.  Each of those numbers lies a tick above minor structural resistance on the hourly chart, although neither resistance, strictly speaking, qualifies as a look-to-the-left peak in that time frame.