 Hello, welcome to this week's CMC Markets Commodity Snapshot. This week we are going to be talking about gold. The reason is that it's just broken through a year-long support and the situation for US interest rates is looking increasingly problematic for the precious metal. So the fundamental story on gold is becoming a pretty familiar one. Indeed, gold has been falling off since it almost reached $2,000 per ounce because of a relative strengthening in the US dollar and that's accelerated in recent months. The physical demand side of gold seems to be holding up quite well. China's economy is slowing and China one of the biggest demanders of physical gold, but counter to that the Chinese central bank is looking to diversify away from US dollars and so there is some demand for physical gold coming from the government there and that's supported a bit by physical demand from India. So physically gold is holding up but it's really this US dollar side of the equation that's letting it down and we were given an indication as to how bearish this market has become by the breakthrough $1,180 per ounce just in the last week or so. So let's have a look at the chart and see what exactly this could mean for gold. What we're going to do is look at a couple of different time frame charts for gold. The first is a shorter term four hour chart and we can see gold breaking through the $1,180 per ounce mark basically fell about $20 down to $1,161 and formed a range up to about the $1,175 mark. It has subsequently broken down through that range without even retesting the $1,180 mark and we're now sitting around $1,140. So that's the short term outlook, a downtrend obviously. Well let's see where we are in the longer term scope of things. For that we're going to broaden our reach right out to a monthly chart and what you can see here is what we potentially have on the cards here is a bearish pennant whereby this big steep decline is the first pole. We've broken through what is essentially a triangle pattern at this $1,180 level and so from there we would actually project the length of that first pole down and if it reached 100% that would actually be $575 per ounce. So we're basically talking about a complete collapse in the price of gold should that pattern play out. Some levels to keep in mind before we get there though is that we have $1,040 that was the March 2008 high and it obviously sitting just above the key $1,000 psychological level and the $1,618 extension so not 100% but more like 61.8% retracement extension sits around $800 per ounce. So a few prices to consider here way below current levels. Obviously these chart patterns don't always work out but it's certainly something to keep in mind. So that's it for this week's CMC markets commodity snapshot. We were of course looking at gold. Now the big consideration as mentioned is the US dollar. Gold is denominated in US dollars and that's really what's sealing its fate right now. If you look at a price of gold in yen, Japanese yen, then price of gold is actually going up. That tells you something. So really it's about Federal Reserve policy and the imminent raise in interest rates in the US. If that should suddenly start looking like it's not going to happen or if it starts happening but it looks like perhaps the central bank will go back in the other way and start moving towards a quantitative easing program again that would be good for gold but short of that happening the commodity is distinctly under pressure right now.