1st March 2017

 Gold lost roughly $5/ounce on Tuesday, while silver lost $.12. There were modest declines in both platinum and palladium as well. We were not that surprised by the retrenchment in the precious group, as we wrote in Monday’s note that gold could come under some pressure over the short-term in light of Chairman Janet Yellen’s speech scheduled for Friday and Donald Trump’s speech slated to start in a few hours time (and not last night as we erroneously reported in Monday’s note). Of the two, we think that the Yellen’s speech will be the far more consequential, but for some reason, investors seem to be more interested in what the President has to say. Some of Trump’s themes have already been leaked to the press and so we will not rehash them here. (One late-breaking surprise is a CNN report that says the President might propose a compromise immigration bill that would allow millions of undocumented workers to remain in the US, effectively undoing much of what the President has been proposing over the past few months