The last trading day of the first half of 2021 concludes, and gold incurs losses
New York (July 1) Now that the last trading day has concluded for the second quarter or first half of 2021, it is clear that gold had a difficult time incurring lower pricing over the last six months. Gold futures opened at $1954 on the first trading day in January and closed today at $1770.60, suffering a drawdown of $184. That means that gold lost 9.416% in value over the first half of 2021.
Headwinds from dollar strength, a flight into the cryptocurrencies during the first quarter of 2021, higher yields in U.S. debt instruments, and a strong U.S. equities markets all contributed to gold’s price demise during the first half of this year.
The U.S. dollar index traded at 89.85 on the first trading day of 2021 and is currently fixed at 92.345, gaining 2.495 points in the first half of 2021. This is an increase of approximately two ½% in the value of the U.S. dollar when compared to a basket of six major currencies.
Both the NASDAQ Composite and Standard & Poor’s 500 were extremely strong, closing at or near record levels by the close of trading today. The S&P 500 closed at a record high, with the NASDAQ composite closing slightly lower on the day after hitting a record high close earlier this week. According to Dow Jones data, the three major U.S. stock indexes recorded the best two-quarter performance since 2019.
ADP report shows that 692,000 jobs were added in June
The precursor to Friday’s U.S. Labor Department’s jobs report is the ADP (Automatic Data Processing) private sector came in today, indicating that 690,000 private-sector jobs were added from May to June. Economists polled had forecasted that the ADP report would indicate between 550,000 and 600,000 new jobs created. Obviously, the actual numbers came in well above economic forecasts. Concurrently the May numbers were revised down to 886,000 jobs from the original number of 978,000. The service sector was the primary recipient of new jobs with gains of 624,000, with good producing jobs coming in at 68,000.
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