So much money printed. Excessive debt. Even pandemic! And gold failed to hold gains. But that’s how markets work, no matter what gold permabulls say. Gold plunged yesterday, just as it was likely to. The fake reason? U.S. retail sales exceeded expectations. The real reason? A major downtrend. On the above gold chart, I added annotations that show what happened in the previous 3 cases after the retail sales reports. We saw the following: • gold declined after retail sales disappointed in June • gold topped after retail sales outperformed in July • gold paused its rally after retail sales disappointed in August • gold ... (full story)