Gold & Precious Metals Corner

Wednesday, 2026-09-23 · covering the last 24h

Market signal

Gold and silver give back Tuesday's gains as the dollar jumps and Hormuz risk drains out, hitting the miners hardest. Spot gold slid more than 1.5% on Wednesday, dropping from Tuesday's $4,330–4,360 band to about $4,290 by mid-afternoon in New York (Kitco pegged it at $4,290.30, down $66.70 on the day), as a hawkish Fed repricing pushed the dollar to a two-month high and reports that the Strait of Hormuz could reopen within days drained the geopolitical premium that had been propping up bullion ahead of Wednesday's Trump–Xi summit. Silver fell harder, dropping below $66 to around $64.40, pulling the gold/silver ratio back out to roughly 66 after it had compressed toward 65.7 earlier in the week. Platinum dropped about 4% to near $1,747 and palladium eased roughly 1% into the $1,270–1,290 range. Mining equities took the brunt of it: GDX tumbled about 4.3% to roughly $94, its worst day among major sector ETFs, with the South African-linked names — Gold Fields, AngloGold Ashanti, Harmony Gold and Sibanye-Stillwater — down 3.6%–5.5%, a sharp reversal from Tuesday's rally in Newmont and Agnico Eagle on fresh analyst price-target hikes. Yahoo Finance · Kitco · Benzinga

Upstream — miners, streamers & supply

Barrick taps AI firm Avathon to run an "AI-native" operating model across its North American gold business ahead of the unit's planned IPO. Barrick's North American business signed a multi-year strategic partnership with industrial-AI company Avathon, worth up to $20m a year to the vendor, to deploy its Autonomy Platform across exploration, mine planning, processing, maintenance and supply chain at the Carlin, Cortez, Turquoise Ridge and Pueblo Viejo complex — the same assets Barrick is preparing to spin off in a minority-stake IPO it still targets for year-end 2026, even as Bloomberg has reported the company is weighing pushing that listing into 2027. Avathon release · Mining.com (Bloomberg wire, IPO delay)

No other company-specific upstream news broke in the window.

Physical & official flows — central banks, ETFs & bullion

The PBoC posts its biggest monthly gold buy since October 2023, stretching its buying streak to 22 months. China's central bank added 20.2 tonnes to official reserves in August — its largest single-month addition in nearly three years — taking cumulative holdings to 2,387 tonnes and lifting gold's share of total FX reserves to about 9%, up from 8% in July. The World Gold Council's Ray Jia notes onshore gold-ETF holdings kept rising into early September even as Shanghai Gold Exchange bullion withdrawals fell by more than the season typically calls for — a split market of strong official and investment demand alongside continued softness in jewellery consumption. World Gold Council (Ray Jia)

Silver's COMEX-vs-London exchange-for-physical spread has widened to roughly 50¢ (about 4.95%) against a ~3.75% London OTC spread, a gap some desks read as the market beginning to price the risk of tariffs on investment-grade silver bar imports; it echoes, at far smaller scale, last October's lease-rate spike, but no confirmed new lease-rate print has followed it, so treat it as a developing signal rather than a squeeze. Investing.com

No new GLD/SLV weekly flow data or Shanghai/India premium prints were published in the window; last week's GLD-to-GLDM/IAU fee-arbitrage rotation and China's import pace, both already reported, stand unchanged.

Silver & PGMs — the industrial complex

No new industrial-demand, recycling or autocatalyst data broke in the window; the Silver Institute's sixth-consecutive-deficit forecast and the WPIC's flip to a platinum surplus, both already reported, stand unchanged. Wednesday's PGM softness tracked the broader dollar-driven complex (see Market signal) rather than any new fundamental input.

The Chatter

Vince Lanci — GoldFix (Substack): In "Gold: Jefferies' Chris Wood Says $10,000 is Inevitable," Lanci amplifies Jefferies strategist Christopher Wood's on-record call, from the Jefferies India Forum, that gold is going to at least $10,000/oz "sooner or later" because the US cannot sustain materially higher real rates given its fiscal position; Wood's own benchmark compares gold to US disposable income per capita — where the metal's 1980 peak of $850 equated to 9.9% of that figure — and he tells unhedged investors to buy now and existing holders to add on any pullback into $3,800–4,000. Post · BusinessToday (underlying comments)

Ronald-Peter Stöferle — Incrementum: In an interview published by finanzen.net, Stöferle argues gold remains "extremely cheap" — not against its nominal price but measured against the money supply and global debt it is meant to hedge — forecasts a possible run to $4,900 by year-end on continued central-bank buying, and maintains that the "Golden Decade" thesis running to 2030 is still in its early-to-middle innings despite the recent pullback. Interview (German)

Citi commodities strategists: Citi lifted its zero-to-three-month gold target to $4,800 and held its six-to-twelve-month target at $5,000, arguing that if the Strait of Hormuz returns to normal shipping in the fourth quarter, the resulting drop in oil prices would flip from headwind to catalyst for gold — easing inflation, giving the Fed room to cut, and pushing the dollar and real yields lower, all of which cut the opportunity cost of holding bullion. TradingKey