Gold steadily climbs to multi-day tops, beyond $1290 level

   •  A fresh wave of risk-aversion trade underpins the commodity’s safe-haven demand.
   •  A modest USD pull-back provides an additional boost and remained supportive.
   •  Investors’ focus remains glued to today’s key release of the US monthly jobs report.

Gold gained some positive traction on the last trading day of the week and was seen building on the overnight attempted bounce from over one-month lows.

A combination of supporting factors provided a strong lift and assisted the precious metal to finally break out of a three-day-old consolidative trading range, through the recovery seemed lacking any strong bullish conviction ahead of today's key event risk. 

A fresh wave of global risk-aversion trade, as depicted by a sea of red across global equity markets, triggered by a sharp fall in Chinese exports data for February, turned out to be one of the key factors underpinning the precious metal's relative safe-haven demand.

This coupled with a modest US Dollar pull-back from YTD tops, touched in wake of dovish ECB-led slump in the shared currency, provided an additional boost to the dollar-denominated commodity and remained supportive of the goodish intraday positive momentum.

Despite the small gains, the commodity is still far from registering any meaningful recovery and remained well below the key $1300 psychological mark as market participants now look forward to the keenly watched US non-farm payrolls data for a fresh directional impetus.

Technical levels to watch

Any subsequent move beyond the $1294-95 immediate resistance might confront some fresh supply near the $1300 handle, above which a fresh bout of short-covering could lift the commodity further towards the $1305-06 horizontal zone. On the flip side, the $1287 level now becomes immediate support to defend, which if broken would mark a fresh bearish breakdown and accelerate the fall further towards testing $1278-77 support area.