Everybody is just a gold spectator

It’s baseball season so let’s use a Yogi Berra’s quote.

For the gold market is it deja vu all over again?

The price goes up toward $1,300 and then back down it comes.

After observing just how close gold was to $1,300 on Tuesday morning, we arrive on Friday morning to see the precious metal $30 lower at $1,264.60, according to the Kitco website.

In percentage terms, the swing is a paltry 2.3 percent.

Is it worth the bother of commenting on?

We humans love round numbers.

$1,300 seems so much higher than $1,299.99.

Fluctuations are normal.

That’s what prices do.

But demand for gold American Eagle bullion coins did not confirm increasing interest in gold bullion as prices rose.

Only 500-ounces worth of tenth-ounce coins have been sold so far in the month of June.

These coins often end up in jewelry.

They are not the favored playthings of investors.

Investors like the nice round amount of one-ounce.

They focus on the coins of that size when they are on the prowl.

So far this year, 137,000 one-ounce gold Eagles have been sold, which is 73 percent of all the gold Eagles sold this year as measured in troy ounces.

But not one has been sold in June.

One of my colleagues has taken this beautiful day off.

Perhaps that is what gold bullion coin buyers have done all week.

No Eagles have been sold since I wrote about them on Tuesday.

For that matter, no silver Eagles have been sold since then either.

But the price fluctuation for silver has been more muted.

It has been trading over $17 all week, but not near enough to the round number $18 to get us hypercharged about it.

The month of May looked like it could be the beginning of a turnaround in weak demand for bullion Eagles that set in after the January sales of coins with new dates.

However, maybe not.

Perhaps we should all take time off and not return to this topic again until after the Fourth of July.

Last year that is when the real price downtrend set in.

Buzz blogger Dave Harper has twice won the Numismatic Literary Guild Award for Best Blog and is editor of the weekly newspaper "Numismatic News."

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