Gold renewed its slide lower Tuesday morning, ending a brief rally on safe haven buying following the Paris terrorist attacks, as investors' focus return to the US monetary policy and the strong dollar.
Gains of 1-2% on the COMEX gold spot price Monday proved short-lived, as markets returned to normal fairly rapidly after the attacks in Paris late Friday pushed some global equity markets higher at the open Monday.
Investors' focus has since returned to interest rate expectations from the US, whilst signals from the European Central Bank Thursday of renewed quantitative easing helped push gold back towards last week's new five-year low of $1,074/oz seen on international spot markets.
Commitment of Traders data released by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission Tuesday, showed net long positions were at six-week lows.
Total net long positions were 16,869 for the week ending November 11, down 75% on the previous week, data showed.
"As the CFTC's statistics reveal, speculative financial investors have contributed significantly to the slide in gold and silver prices since the end of October," said Commerzbank in a note Tuesday.
Net long positions in silver were down 46% on the week, at 27,229 contracts.
Whilst withdrawals from exchange-traded products backed by precious metals continue.
Holdings in SPDR Gold Shares, the world's largest ETP backed by physically held gold, are at their lowest since 2008, data from the company showed Tuesday.
Gold holdings totaled 661.94 mt as of Monday, down 4.17 mt on the week, to levels not seen since the financial crisis in 2008.
Total holdings in physically backed gold ETPs are around 1,600 mt.
The London Bullion Market Association Gold Price settled at $1,080.80/oz Tuesday morning, down $3.95/oz on the previous session, to the lowest level since July.
