I hope all my American recipients had an enjoyable and relaxing Thanksgiving this week. The US financial markets were closed all day Thursday and half a day on Friday. We’ve since erected our Christmas Tree (all three feet of it) and started watching the classic British sitcom hour long Christmas specials. I love December.
TL/DR (Too Long/Didn’t Read) Summary: After an incredibly difficult prior seven days, this week every asset class performed extremely well. Hurrah! Let’s see if the rally continues into the end of the year or if it’s (yet) another false dawn.
Stocks/Equities: All indices up strongly, bouncing back from last week’s gloomy news about “AI bubbles bursting”, etc.
Gold/Silver: Great performance, especially Friday, when silver rose $3 (almost 6%) in ONE day.
Cryptocurrency: Bitcoin regained $90k. Still impossible to say which way the market’s going to go in the short term.
Bonds/US Dollar: Bond yields down. USD very slightly weaker.
Stocks:
Excellent weekly performance, all three major indices are up between ~4-5%. As such, we’re back in record high territory again, which is where we were a month or so ago. November’s been a very difficult month for most investors, but at least it ended on a high note.
In the UK, there was also the annual “budget” announcement made on Wednesday by the Chancellor of the Exchequer (which is the name given to the British finance minister), Rachel Reeves. This statement to parliament contains the government’s fiscal policy intentions for the upcoming twelve months (fiscal policy is essentially what tax rates are imposed by government, and where the resulting tax revenue is allocated). I’ll be honest-I haven’t had a chance to read about it in detail yet, but if any of my British subscribers have any thoughts on it, I’d love to hear them.
There’ll be more news next week announced by the US Federal government, and the big topic of speculation remains around the Federal Reserve and whether or not they’ll cut interest rates following their upcoming meeting on December 10th. We’ll see what they decide to do, but as things stand, the market is expecting a 25 basis point cut.
Wall St ends higher on growing bets for December Fed rate cut
Here are the week’s indices-a lovely sea of green:
nasdaq composite – Google Search
Gold/Silver:
A phenomenally impressive week for the yellow and white metals, especially Friday’s half day of trading, when silver shot up by 6% within a few hours. Although not unheard of, this level of volatility is extremely rare in precious metals.
Silver hit record highs in 2025 and still has further to run
There was also a strange story suggesting that the volatility seen on Friday may have partly been caused by an outage at a Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) Group data center, apparently caused by a cooling malfunction.
Global futures reopen after exchange operator CME suffers multi-hour disruption | Reuters
CME Group is the world’s largest operator of financial exchanges. Something about the above article doesn’t make sense, so I’m not sure what’s really going on-but It seems like a cover up to me. Anyway, I’m not complaining.
Gold closed the week up $154 (~4%) at $4,232 (was $4,078 last Friday). It again remained above the key $4,000/oz support level.
Silver closed the week up at $56.58, up $6.39 or ~13% since last Friday. It more than maintained the key $50/oz support level.
Gold/Silver Ratio: Fell to 74.8 (was 81.3 last Friday)-due to silver climbing more than gold this week.
Cryptos:
Rallied slightly this week, although things had been so depressing for the previous six weeks in Cryptoworld that we were due some good news. I’ve decided that all the speculation in the world isn’t productive, as none of us have a clue which way it’s going to go. I’m not selling at the moment, and that’s that.
Prices on the week:
Bitcoin’s up $4k at around $91k.
Ethereum’s up $200 at around $3,000.
BTC/ETH ratio: Down to 30.3 (was 31.0 last Friday).
Ripple (XRP) up $0.10 at around $2.20.
Solana’s up $3 at around $136.
Bonds/US Dollar:
The US Treasury 10-year bond yield is down again-now at 4.01% (was 4.06% as of last week).
The 30-year bond yield decreased by 5 basis points (was 4.71%, now 4.66%), so also lower on the week. This means the bonds’ prices have risen this week, since bond prices and yields are inversely correlated. I could understand yields falling and prices increasing when “risk assets” like stocks and cryptos are doing badly, but they did well this week-so as I keep saying-who knows what’s going on right now?
https://www.bloomberg.com/markets/rates-bonds/government-bonds/us
Meanwhile, the US Dollar has weakened against the Swiss Franc-last week, it cost $1.24 to buy 1CHF. This week, it’s more expensive at $1.25.
Still seems fairly range bound at the moment; one Swiss has cost between $1.22-$1.27 since June.
Alright. Until next time, I’ll talk atcha. If anyone has any comments or questions, please let me know.
Good luck and happy investing,
Tom Curran
