Now We Know Why Gold Is Exploding Higher

Two days ago I told you gold was breaking out of a SIX-MONTH falling wedge, with an upside target of $7,000 per ounce.

The market didn’t wait around to prove me right.

Gold has ripped from roughly $4,050 on Monday to over $4,350 this morning. That’s a nearly $300 move in less than a week. Markets don’t do that unless something has fundamentally changed underneath them.

Something did.

This morning’s July jobs report came in ugly. The U.S. economy shed 23,000 jobs when Wall Street was looking for a gain of 80,000+. And just to make sure you got the message, the prior two months got revised DOWN by a combined 103,000 jobs.

Markets had been leaning toward a Fed rate hike in September. Those odds got gutted within minutes of this report, and Treasury yields dropped right along with them. A Fed that’s now boxed out of hiking, with yields falling, is about as good as it gets for gold. You cannot hike your way out of inflation once the jobs numbers start rolling over, and the bond market just figured that out in real time.

This is the exact setup I described Wednesday, just with a second engine bolted on. Gold miners are running the best margins in the sector’s history, roughly 31% versus 17% for the next best S&P sector, on all-in sustaining costs near $1,600/oz against a gold price now pushing past $4,300. Every dollar gold adds from here goes straight to the bottom line. And instead of diluting shareholders at the top like they did last cycle, miners are buying back stock.

The charts are clear: the lows are in, and the breakout is here. The VanEck Gold Miners ETF (GDX) is EXPLODING out of the falling wedge formation I outlined earlier this week.