Absolutely nothing.

What was demonstrated was how easy it is to push a commodity (up or down) on a New York Friday after lunch, when half the traders are gone for the day, and the European and other world markets are closed for another three days. And once you’ve pushed the price through few stops and triggered program selling, its Katy bar the door and look out below.

Pricewise, we saw quite a blow to gold, and Monday’s trading will tell us a lot about the short-term reaction to Friday’s blowout. It will no doubt take a while to crawl back to the level that gold prices had previously maintained over the past couple of weeks.

But in the meantime, buyers got another shot at gold for a slightly cheaper price, and our customers certainly took advantage of it. We actually wrote more sales tickets this past Friday than any other day in our history, and nearly all of that business came after lunch. A lot of people were waiting to buy into weakness, and this was the first such opportunity in a while.

Long term, we feel the gold rally is still comfortably intact. And Friday’s fireworks were certainly fun and potentially profitable for those adding to long-term positions.

Hey, gold is exciting stuff! And once in a while, it makes a 3.6% move in a day’s time just to remind us of that fact.