As the culturally chaotic — albeit not (yet?) financially frantic — year races past, 41 trading weeks now complete, Gold just recorded its seventh best, rising 2.1% (27 points) in settling on Friday at 1306.

Not that impressive, you say, given we oft quip that “change is an illusion whereas price is the truth”? Well truth be told, price this past week survived and nicely rebounded from a serious support test: that of the badgering 1280-1240 box which never seems to go away, akin to Mackenzie Phillips in the role of Carol from the ’73 film classic “American Graffiti”.

Thus we turn to Gold’s weekly bars, having anticipated a week ago that “the infamous 1280-1240 box will hold, such that price shall then spring back up”. In so doing our bidding, price also escaped the clutches of the ascending blue dots such as to keep the parabolic Long trend alive. Add to that Gold’s widely-watched daily MACD (moving average convergence divergence) having confirmed a positive crossing on Thursday, our Market Rhythms data in turn giving price a 70% chance of stretching this run to at least 1332. ‘Course, what we’d really like to see is reclamation of last year’s high up at Base Camp 1377, and therein to dig in for the return to Gold’s glory. That’s out there; here’s what’s here:

Dollar softness helped Gold up the week’s road, as did a bit of unveiled hesitancy amongst some members of the Federal Open Market Committee, their 19/20 September Minutes noting concern that tame inflation may be not simply a function of transitory developments. But then came a week-ending finale of firmer inflation data on both wholesale and retail readings, sending the Producer Price Index from +0.2% in August to +0.4 in September, and likewise for the Consumer Price Index from +0.4% to +0.5%, the latter being the second strongest month-over-month increase since the June 2013 reading.