Well we got the usual monthly smackdown afterall today, but lets step back and look at the entire picture. There were several raids to try and knock gold down earlier in the month that failed. Today I suspect it was a massive paper dump that finally got the futures to roll over and trigger some stop losses. But the correction has happened from a level close to $1000 and not below $900 as would have occurred if the pre-emptive raids last week had not failed. The fundamentals that were driving gold higher for the last few weeks are still intact. I posted yesterday that the options expiry window has been so obvious for years that money would be positioned on the sidelines waiting for the latest takedown before stepping up to do any buying in the sector. Well, watch how quickly this time around that happens, now that we have some good bargains on hand with several juniors getting hit hard today.

Lets not make this into a big deal. This takedown is no different from what we have put up with every month for years. Instead, we should be encouraged that the manipulative raids are becoming less effective and the Cartel probably had to dump a lot of gold today in order to bring the spot price down to a point where much of the paper options will expire worthless. And even then they were only able to take out the top part of the move and many more options are well in the money below $900. I do not think it will take very long for the metals to resume the upward trend this time around.

cheers!

mike