Ranges are unglamorous and they are where the information is. Spot gold has now spent the better part of a quarter refusing to make a new high and refusing, more importantly, to break down. Every attempt to press it lower has been absorbed within a session or two, which is not the behaviour of a market held up by momentum money.
Who absorbs a sell-off
Momentum buyers chase strength and disappear into weakness. Reserve managers, allocators rebalancing to a fixed weight and physical buyers in Asia do the opposite. When the bid reappears on down days and fades on up days, the composition of demand has changed even if the headline price has not.
A floor is a slower, duller and far more durable thing than a peak.
What breaks the range
Two candidates. A genuine turn in real-rate expectations would release the pressure that has capped every rally this year. A liquidity event somewhere else would do the opposite for a few violent sessions, since gold is what gets sold when nothing else can be. Neither is forecastable and both are worth being positioned for.
