Gold flirts with all-time highs as banking concerns deepen

Gold made another run toward record highs on Thursday as U.S. banking concerns accelerated a flight to the safe-haven asset and sustained its stellar rally driven by bets for a pause in U.S. rate hikes.

Spot gold was up 0.3% at $2,045.79 per ounce after climbing earlier to $2,072.19, shy of a record high of $2,072.49.

U.S. gold futures settled 0.9% higher at $2,055.70.

The melt-up in prices overnight associated with the banking stress revealed that traders are willing to deploy some of their dry powder, said Daniel Ghali, commodity strategist at TD Securities.

And although trend-following commodity trading advisors seem to be at their maximum long-position sizes, “discretionary traders still have a horde of dry powder to deploy, and this is the cohort we think is engaging in gold today”, Ghali added.