Gold Non-Commercial Positions:
Large speculators and traders continued to decrease their net positions in the gold futures markets in the final week of 2016, according to the latest Commitment of Traders (COT) data released by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) on Friday.
The non-commercial futures contracts of Comex gold futures, traded by large speculators and hedge funds, totaled a net position of 98,343 contracts in the data reported through December 27th. This was a weekly change of -16,491 contracts from the previous week which had a total of 114,834 net contracts.
This was the seventh straight week of declining net bullish positions in gold and the first time net bullish positions have been under the +100,000 threshold since February 9th 2016.
Gold Commercial Positions:
The commercial traders position, categorized by the CFTC as hedgers or traders engaged in buying and selling for business purposes, totaled a net position of -120,967 contracts last week. This is a weekly change of 13,055 contracts from the total net of -134,022 contracts reported the previous week.
Gold ETF:
Over the same weekly reporting time-frame, from Tuesday to Tuesday, the SPDR Gold Shares (NYSE:GLD) ETF, which tracks the price of gold, closed at approximately $108.56 which was a change of $0.77 from the previous close of $107.79, according to ETF market data from Yahoo Finance.