Gold Slides Below $1,500

Gold fell on Friday to its lowest price point since July 2011. The yellow metal hit an early morning trade price of $1,498.30 an ounce before recovering some of its losses.

The price drop does not come on the back of any major news, with traders identifying the fall as largely technical, spurred on by heavy stop-loss selling. “It’s a liquidation event. The market is forcing people out,” Frank Lesh, broker and futures analyst with FuturePath Trading, told Kitco.

In light of the worsening Cyprus banking sector and growing concerns that Eurozone nations will sell their gold to raise cash, gold investors seem to have lost confidence in gold as a safe haven asset. Frank Cholly, senior commodity broker at RJO Futures in Chicago, told Bloomberg that “[t]he argument for gold as a safe haven or protection against inflation just isn’t there. We have a risk-on market, with a lot of money pouring into equities. It doesn’t look too good for gold.”