On Friday morning the yellow metal was testing the resistance of various technical levels. If it break them, a surge up to the 1,320.00 levels could occur.
Meanwhile, a new ascending pattern has been added to the daily chart.
The Canadian Employment data release will occur today at 13:30 GMT.
Meanwhile, take into account that at 09:30 GMT on Monday the UK GDP and Manufacturing Production will be published. It will occur before the weekly calendar analysis stream.
Both of these events are scheduled to be covered by Dukascopy Analytics on our Dukascopy Webinars YouTube channel. The streams start ten minutes before the data release.
For more detailed info and a chance to ask questions watch the weekly calendar analysis by clicking on the link below.
XAU/USD short term forecast
During Thursday's trading session, the yellow metal broke the resistance of the monthly pivot point at 1,308.46 to end the trading session at 1,309.46. On Friday morning, the gold was resisted by the 100-hour simple moving average at the 1,309.83 mark.
In regards to the near-term future, it is expected that the 100-hour simple moving average will continue retracing the rate to push it to trade sideways at the 1,310.00 level.
On the other hand, the support level of the monthly pivot point at the 1,308.46 mark could support the yellow metal to break the resistance of the 100-hour to trade at 1,312.00.
Hourly Chart
A new pattern has been added to the daily chart and old patterns were deleted. Note that it is a simple ascending channel pattern, which captures the surge of the yellow metal that has been occurring since November.If the pattern manages to guide the commodity price higher, by the start of April, the commodity price should trade above the 1,350.00 level. Although, on its way upwards the metal will face various monthly pivot points.
Meanwhile, all simple moving daily averages are far below the metal, indicating that it is overbought.
Daily Chart
Traders continue to decrease short sentiment
By the middle of Friday's trading session the short term oriented traders of the Swiss Foreign Exchange continued to close their short positions. Namely, 67% of open positions were short. At the start of the week 73% were shorting the metal.
In the meantime, trader pending orders in the 1000-base point range were in the neutral zone. 51% of orders were set to sell the metal.
Combine the large number of shorts with the neutral pending orders. It can be deducted that there are a lot of traders that have no open positions, but have set up sell orders.
It is deducted by assuming that the short positions should have set up stop losses and take profits, which are essentially buy orders. Meanwhile, as the total amount is neutral, it means that these buy orders are matched by sell orders.