Gold steadily climbs to session tops, farther beyond $1400 handle

Gold quickly reversed an early Asian session dip to sub-$1400 level and was now seen building on Friday's late rebound from the post-NFP swing lows.

The headlines NFP showed that the US economy added 224K new jobs in June and forced market participants to cut their bets for an aggressive interest rate cut by the Fed later this month. The same was evident from a sharp rebound in the US Treasury bond yields and exerted some downward pressure on the non-yielding yellow metal.

In fact, the yield on the benchmark 10-year US government bond jumped back above the key 2.0% level, which lifted the US Dollar to two-week highs and further collaborated towards driving flows away from the dollar-denominated commodity, dragging it farther below the key $1400 psychological mark. 

However, the US President Donald Trump's fresh criticism on the Fed's policy tightening triggered a fresh leg of a slide in the US bond yields, which kept a lid on any strong follow-through up-move for the greenback and eventually helped the commodity to regain positive traction at the start of a new trading week.

This coupled with deteriorating risk sentiment, as depicted by a weaker trading sentiment around equity markets, and fading optimism over a quick resolution of the prolonged US-China trade disputes provided an additional boost to the precious metal's relative safe-haven status and remained supportive of the up-move.

It would now be interesting to see if bulls are able to capitalize on the positive momentum amid absent relevant market moving economic releases from the US and ahead of the next event risk - the Fed Chair Jerome Powell's two-day Congressional testimony on Wednesday and Thursday.

Technical levels to watch