Gold regains traction after yesterday's pullback from 1-1/2 year tops

Gold regained some positive traction on Friday and managed to recover part of previous session's sharp corrective slide from 1-1/2 year tops. 

A smart US Dollar recovery move, after the US President Donald Trump backed a stronger greenback, prompted some aggressive selling around the dollar-denominated commodity on Thursday. Spot prices retreated around 1.75% from an intraday high level of $1366 to finally end its four consecutive days of winning streak.

A fresh wave of greenback selling emerged during the Asian session on Friday and eventually helped the precious metal to edge higher. Adding to this, a weaker tone around Asian equity market was also seen underpinning demand for traditional safe-haven assets and further collaborated to the commodity's move back above $1350 level.

It, however, remains to be seen if bulls are able to retain their dominant position or the current pull-back is sold into amid a mildly positive tone surrounding the US Treasury bond yields, which tends to drive flows away from the non-yielding yellow metal.

Moving ahead, investors' focus would remain glued to the key US macro releases - advance GDP growth figures and durable goods orders, which if betters expectations could prompt some additional profit-taking slide on the last trading day of the week. 

Technical levels to watch

Immediate resistance is now pegged near $1358 level, above which the commodity is likely to head back towards $1366 level before darting towards 2016 highs resistance near the $1375 region.

On the flip side, $1348-47 area now seems to protect the immediate downside, which if broken could accelerate the fall towards $1340 horizontal support en-route $1335 level.