Gold walked into the week carrying its lowest close of the year and walked out with its best week since August. Most of the lifting happened in one overnight session, as midterm returns came in and currency traders rethought the dollar. A hot jobs report on Friday took a little off the top, but only a little. Gold finished at $4,070.59, up 5.0% on the week, and every metal on the board closed higher.
The week in numbers
Weekly change is Friday close to Friday close (October 30 to November 6). Highs and lows are intraweek, taken from our minute archive between the Sunday-evening reopen and Friday’s close, on the same basis for all four metals. Days are UTC.
- Gold: up 5.0%, from $3,875.20 to $4,070.59. High $4,144.94 (Thursday), low $3,884.00 (Sunday-evening reopen).
- Silver: up 5.7%, from $49.13 to $51.94. High $53.33 (Thursday), low $48.64 (Tuesday).
- Platinum: up 7.3%, from $1,435.00 to $1,539.05. High $1,550.65 (Friday), low $1,393.32 (Wednesday).
- Palladium: up 4.4%, from $980.70 to $1,023.90. High $1,065.96 (Thursday), low $928.97 (Wednesday).
The stories that moved the market
Monday set a brighter tone. Crude fell more than 7% amid a swirl of Iran headlines, including unconfirmed reports of concessions on Iran’s nuclear program and frozen funds, and gold, which has spent much of the autumn moving opposite to oil, rose 1.8% to $3,946.59. It managed that even though October’s ISM manufacturing index came in at 55.5, firmer than the roughly 54.7 economists expected. Silver did better still, up 3.1%.
The calm lasted about a day. Overnight into Tuesday, U.S. forces struck military targets on Iran’s Qeshm Island, in what officials called defensive action to protect shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, and Brent climbed back to about $106. With the 10-year Treasury yield near 4.9% and voters heading to the polls, gold gave back 0.4%. Silver touched $48.64, its low for the week, and platinum and palladium both posted their lowest closes in our one-year daily record.
Then the election results changed the conversation. Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate, and the dollar fell against major currencies on Wednesday while Treasury yields eased, amid analyst views that a divided government could make new federal borrowing harder to pass. Platinum and palladium actually set their weekly lows in the small hours of Wednesday, with returns still coming in, before rallying hard. By the close, gold was up 3.3% at $4,061.52, its largest one-day gain since August 19. Silver jumped 5.0% and palladium 7.5%. The buying carried into Asian hours on Thursday, when gold reached $4,144.94, and its Thursday close of $4,087.97 was the highest since October 21.
Friday brought the counterweight. The economy added 165,000 jobs in October, nearly triple the consensus forecast, unemployment slipped to 4.1%, and average hourly earnings rose 0.4% on the month. The 2-year Treasury yield rose to about 4.52%, and the CME FedWatch tool put the odds of a quarter-point rate hike at the Fed’s December 8-9 meeting near 77%. Gold eased 0.4% on the day. Silver edged up, and platinum added 1.3%, enough to make it the strongest of the four for the week.
What it means for American gold
For a plain one-ounce bullion coin such as the American Gold Eagle, the week added roughly $195 of metal value, Friday close against Friday close. A one-ounce American Silver Eagle gained about $2.80. Those are melt-floor figures, the value of the metal alone, worked out the way our methodology page describes. They say nothing about what any particular coin will fetch.
It took an act of Congress to create the Gold Eagle in the first place. The Gold Bullion Coin Act of 1985 authorized it, and the Mint began issuing the coin in 1986, a fitting footnote in a week when the makeup of Congress was the market’s main story.
Owners of Morgan dollars saw the metal floor rise in step with silver’s 5.7% gain, since each coin holds a little over three-quarters of an ounce. Pre-1933 gold such as the Saint-Gaudens Double Eagle, with just under an ounce of gold, tracked spot gold almost dollar for dollar.
Proof, graded and commemorative coins run on a different and slower clock. They trade above melt on collector demand, and a 5% move in spot doesn’t pass straight through to them. What a week like this mostly does is thicken the floor beneath their premiums. The full coin catalog follows each series as spot moves.
Where this leaves the market
One good week doesn’t undo an autumn. Gold remains about 25% below its record close of $5,414.49, set on January 28, 2026 in our daily archive, a level above any month-end reading in our long-run series. It is down 5.7% for the year, measured from the December 31 close of $4,318.18, after standing about 10% lower a week ago. The 200-day average kept sliding, to about $4,462 from roughly $4,491, but the gap has narrowed: gold now sits about 9% beneath that line, against nearly 14% last Friday.
Silver has further to travel. At $51.94 it stands about 55% below its own January 28 record close of $116.61, 27% lower on the year and roughly 25% under its 200-day average of about $68.83. Because silver outpaced gold, the gold-silver ratio eased from about 78.9 to 78.4. Platinum’s close was its best since October 28, though it too remains well below its 200-day line. You can follow all of these levels on our live charts.
The week ahead
- Tuesday, Nov. 10: October Consumer Price Index, 8:30 a.m. Eastern.
- Wednesday, Nov. 11: Veterans Day, a federal holiday, with no Labor Department releases scheduled.
- Friday, Nov. 13: October Producer Price Index, 8:30 a.m. Eastern.
- Looking further out: the Fed’s December 8-9 meeting, where futures currently lean toward a hike.
Iran remains the wild card. As of Tuesday, Qatar-mediated talks were described as far from agreement, and this autumn higher oil has tended to weigh on gold rather than lift it.
Sources
- Kitco: Gold gains, silver slips as U.S. midterms and Iran strikes unsettle markets
- TMGM: Why is gold falling again as US midterm elections and sharp oil price swings keep investors wary?
- MercoPress: Markets react to the US midterms, the dollar falls and gold rises
- blue News: After the U.S. midterm elections, gold rises and the dollar falls
- InvestmentNews: October jobs report beats forecasts, lifting December Fed hike odds
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: November 2026 release schedule
Price figures are from FMV Gold’s own minute-by-minute spot archive (UTC trading days).
