Gold Price Near $4,172 Is 25% Below January’s High…

A green session does little to the shape of the year. Bullion sits 25.3% below the $5,589.38 all-time high CBS News dates to 28 January 2026, a shortfall of $1,416.51 that would take a 34% rally to close. The gold price is also down 7.20% over the past month and 12.14% over six months.

Hike Odds Have Fallen Hard Since Late September

Rate expectations have gone one way over the past week. CME FedWatch put the probability of no change at the 28 October FOMC meeting at 78.4% as of 07:35 CT on 6 October, with a hike to 4.00–4.25% at 21.6% and a cut at zero. One week earlier, on 29 September, those odds were almost evenly split, with a hike at 50.9% against 49.1% for no change. The hike probability has shed 29.3 percentage points in five trading sessions, and the gold price has barely moved across the same stretch.

September payrolls did the damage. The month delivered 29,000 jobs against roughly 90,000 expected, weak enough to take the October hike off the table that markets had been setting for weeks. Go back another month and it inverts again. On 4 September, FedWatch showed a 29.8% chance of a cut and 15.8% on a hike.

The Dollar and the Long End Are Setting the Gold Price

Softer labor market data would normally lift bullion. It has not, because the part of the curve that matters to a metal paying no coupon has refused to follow short rates lower. CNBC reported the 10-year Treasury yield reaching a fresh 2002 high at the start of this week, and Trading Economics describes long-dated yields at 24-year peaks while noting that “a stronger dollar and surging Treasury yields outweighed support from softer US jobs data.”

The dollar has compounded it. The dollar index touched 101.61 on 1 October, a 14-week high, helped along by political and fiscal strain in the euro area. A firmer dollar makes bullion costlier for buyers outside the United States, which drags on the gold price from the demand side. Both forces drove the slide that pulled the gold price down from its August levels, and the same dynamic showed up in real yields at their highest in 17 years.

Investor Takeaway

Fund Holders Have Not Followed the Gold Price Down

The most striking number in the gold price story does not come from the price screen. World Gold Council data published on 9 September shows global gold-backed ETFs added US$18bn in August, the second-largest monthly inflow on record. Collective holdings rose 121 tonnes to 4,189 tonnes, the highest the WGC has recorded, and assets under management climbed 16% month on month to US$615bn.

The regional breakdown is just as one-sided. European funds took in US$7.9bn, the region’s strongest month on record, with the UK contributing US$4.4bn. North American funds added US$7.7bn, their third-largest monthly inflow, enough to pull the region back into positive year-to-date territory after a US$13bn outflow in March. Asian funds added US$2bn.

One caveat matters. That data runs through 31 August, and the WGC has not yet published September figures. The gold price has fallen 7.20% since, so the tonnage will have moved. What the August set establishes is that summer selling pressure did not come from the funds, which is a different story from the one central bank demand has been telling.

Three Calendar Events Before 28 October

Michelle Bowman speaks at 10:45 a.m. today at the 2026 Community Banking Research Conference in St. Louis, as Vice Chair for Supervision and on modernizing regulation and supervision. Anyone watching for a policy signal will be disappointed.

The FOMC minutes land on 7 October at 2:00 p.m. and cover the 15–16 September meeting, whose dot plot had 16 of 18 officials projecting another hike this year. Those minutes will now be read against a hike probability near 21%, which makes them the week’s most plausible source of a move in the gold price. September CPI follows on 14 October at 8:30 a.m.

Where the Gold Price Sits Across Timeframes

Over five sessions, the gold price is close to flat, down 0.15%, and the year-to-date reading sits at minus 3.99%. Over a full year, bullion is still ahead by 6.75%.

That mix explains the split positioning. Buyers who entered before October 2025 are in profit, while anyone who bought the January top is nursing a quarter of their capital. The September low near $4,125 is the first level to watch if yields push higher again, and silver’s own move against 19-year high yields offers a read on whether the pressure is metal-wide or specific to the gold price.

Investor Takeaway