Investing.com - Gold gained in Asia on Friday as the pound plunged with investors jittery in volatile trade as a referendum on Britain remaining or leaving the European Union appeared too close to call.
On the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange, gold for August delivery rose 1.58% to $1,282.90 a troy ounce.
Silver futures for July delivery gained 0.85% to $17.500 a troy ounce, while copper futures for July dropped 1.02% to 2.142 a pound.
Initial results in the U.K.'s referendum on membership of the European Union shook markets' earlier conviction that the Remain camp was on the way to victory.
The shock came from a crushing victory for Leave in Sunderland in the north-east of England, and only a narrow win for Remain in the neighbouring City of Newcastle. The results were markedly stronger for Leave than pundits had expected, but they may just be an early indicator of widely divergent regional voting patterns.
Leave won 61.3% of the vote in Sunderland and 49.3% in Newcastle.
Political leaders and officials, with the exception of UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, have avoided forecasting the result.
"I think that Remain might just nick it," Farage said.
The campaign evidence is that swathes of London have been solidly Remain. Against this there have been plenty of anecdotes of unhappy Labour politicians, who have seen strong Leave turnout in some of their traditional northern heartlands.
The Labour leadership backed Remain, while distancing itself from the stay campaign spearheaded by the Conservative leadership.
Overnight, gold futures inched down amid a broadly weaker dollar, as global equities rose sharply on Thursday, hours before polls closed in the U.K.
A Leave vote is widely regarded as bullish for gold, as investors pile into the safe-haven asset due to increased fears that a British departure from the European bloc could trigger a recession throughout the euro zone. Notably, it will take the U.K. a minimum of two years to leave the EU if the Leave campaign prevails.
In the euro area, the FTSE 100 jumped 1.23% to 6,338.10, while the broader Stoxx Euro 600 Index surged 1.47% to 346.34. The strong performance spilled over onto Wall Street, where the major indices were up sharply in U.S. afternoon trading. At 1:00 p.m. EST, the Dow Jones Industrial Average stood at 17,939.10, up 158 points on the session.