Gold Trading Alert: Miners Consolidate Before Next Big Move

Gold basically did nothing once again, but – this might seem surprising – the implications are actually bearish, not neutral. The reason is that gold remains in a rather tight and quickly declining trend channel. The pause that we saw in the past several days was enough to take gold from the lower border of the trend channel (which provided support) to (almost) its middle.

In other words, thanks to doing nothing recently, gold can now move lower without encountering support immediately. It’s still possible that gold will continue to move sideways or even move a bit higher in the following days, but the potential size of the correction is now bigger as the upper border of the declining trend channel is also lower.

The next interim target for gold is at about $1,120 and the final one is at about the $1,000 level.

Once again, nothing changed in the case of silver (and the outlook remains bearish), so let’s move on to the situation in mining stocks and to the reply to the previous question about the miners’ pause.

Newmont Mining (NEM) Stock Closed Lower Today Amid Falling Gold Prices

Shares of Newmont Mining(NEM - Get Report) are lower by 0.27% to $22.06 in after-hours trading after ending Tuesday's regular trading session down 0.81% to $22.12, as gold prices trade in the red ahead of the Federal Reserve policy meeting that could give clues as to the exact timing of the interest rates hikes, according to Reuters.

Spot gold touched its lowest level since November 7 at $1,142.86 an ounce earlier today. U.S. gold futures for April delivery was down 0.49% to $1,147.60 an ounce as of 4:11 p.m. ET today.

Tomorrow is the Federal Reserve's interest rate announcement, following the two day Federal Open Market Committee policy meeting.

Many analysts expect the Fed to remove the word, "patient" from its policy statement, which could bring it closer to raising interest rates, Reuters noted.

Greenwood Village, CO-based Newmont Mining is primarily a gold producer with operations and assets in the U.S., Australia, Peru, Indonesia, Ghana, New Zealand and Mexico.

Separately, TheStreet Ratings team rates NEWMONT MINING CORP as a Hold with a ratings score of C. TheStreet Ratings Team has this to say about their recommendation:

"We rate NEWMONT MINING CORP (NEM) a HOLD. The primary factors that have impacted our rating are mixed, some indicating strength, some showing weaknesses, with little evidence to justify the expectation of either a positive or negative performance for this stock relative to most other stocks. The company's strengths can be seen in multiple areas, such as its impressive record of earnings per share growth, compelling growth in net income and reasonable valuation levels. However, as a counter to these strengths, we find that the stock has had a generally disappointing performance in the past year."