Gold crashes through $1,700 mark

Gold for December delivery lost over $39 an ounce, or more than 2%, to trade at $1,685.40 an ounce on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange by midday on Monday. The losses were on top of a 3.6% slide last week and brings the decline in the metal from its November high to $110/oz.

Bullion jumped to a record $1,921.15 an ounce on Sept. 6 and has now shown 11 consecutive years of price gains, but volatility in the gold market is increasing and the gap between gold’s highs and lows this year have reached more than $600, the largest since the 1960s. Gold has averaged about $1,705 so far this quarter and $1,563 in 2011, figures compiled by Bloomberg show.

MarketWatch quotes Adrian Ash, head of research at BullionVault: “Gold is caught in the same flight to cash as everything else.”

Bloomberg quotes Peter Fertig, owner of Quantitative Commodity Research Ltd. in Hainburg, Germany: “There might be some small bargain-hunting at these levels, but I’m looking more for the downside in gold than the upside.”

BullionVault reported earlier that some investors have been making the most of bullion’s recent weakness. As the gold price fell a net $64.71 or 3.6% last week in USD terms and about €27.03 or 2.1% in Euros, SPDR Gold Shares (NYSE:GLD), the largest gold ETF in the world, once again reported strong positive money flow into the trust.

Marketwatch ranks gold’s ten worst days of trading – including a 7.30% plunge in 2006 – in a blog post.

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