UPDATE: Sure enough, just as we joked, the entire slide has been recovered and now gold is surging. There is, of course, no news in what is apparently just your garden variety HFT-sponsored stop hunt.
[4]
Just as we predicted over an hour ago [5], when we said that "just like on day when Europe is closed we still get a ramp into the European close, expect at least several vacuum tube algos to jump the gun at 8:29:59:999 and try to generate some upward momentum ignition in stocks and downward momentum in gold" it seems the algos who are the only ones trading in the liquidity-free hour decided that the non-existent non-farm payrolls data that otherwise would have hit in 15 minutes should have been better-than-expected and produced a Taper-On reaction from the Fed. Just as we see oh-so-many times in the pre-London-fixing period, precious metals are being slammed lower out of nowhere on no news. The machines, it would appear, caught the signal and decided US equities deserved a modest haircut on that un-news also... of course, as usual with the payrolls data, we would expect this kneejerk reaction to be rapidly reverted.
