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Is This the Top in Gold?

Gold’s historic run this year has been nothing short of impressive. The technical structure has held up beautifully, and the fundamental backdrop has done nothing but reinforce the bid. But the question everyone’s asking is: “are we near a top?” Hard to say with certainty, but Friday may have given traders a handful of signals that are worth paying close attention to.
We saw the kind of activity that often shows up around blow-off tops or early consolidation phases. From a fundamental standpoint, the narrative is still working in gold’s favor. Central banks around the world are still buying aggressively, which keeps physical demand firm. The Fed’s path over the next six months remains murky with inflation proving sticky and tariff policy rolling out slower than expected. Retail demand is holding up too, and as long as neither central banks nor governments start unloading gold to raise cash, the underlying fundamental backdrop may be hard to break.
What really caught traders’ attention on Friday was the action in the SPDR Gold ETF (GLD). Even with the ETF dropping a little over 2% from the highs, it still saw inflows — and the volume spike was the biggest since April 2013. Historically, you don’t see volume like that without the market flashing a yellow light. A volume surge on a down day can be a sign of exhaustion, but the absence of any meaningful outflows tempers that concern for now.
Over in the futures market, gold (/GC) saw its busiest day since March 6, 2020, a session that came right before a 13% pullback over the next nine trading sessions. That kind of volume is the market’s way of telling you something may be changing, but the key difference this time is open interest: it actually rose by more than 3,500 contracts on Friday. That means traders were adding, not liquidating. If this was truly a top, futures traders would expect to see price fall with open interest also declining, and that hasn’t happened yet.
Technically, the 20-day simple moving average has been the backbone of this rally. Even a pullback to that level would keep the higher-high, higher-low structure intact. The real stress test would come if gold broke below the 100-day SMA, a level that hasn’t been touched since early 2025. Until then, the uptrend remains technically sound.
So, is this the top? Not necessarily. But Friday’s action was loud enough to deserve your attention. Multi-year volume spikes at major levels don’t show up all that often. If price starts slipping through key support zones or open interest finally starts to contract, that’s when the story may shift.
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