Gold’s so-called death cross is not its only problem. video

The week is not going well for gold, again, and that’s after some had predicted China might start jumping in after leaving gold on its own last week during the Lunar New Year celebrations. (See  Could China ride to gold’s rescue? ).

Gold  GCJ3 -0.33% was down $24.10, or 1.5%, at $1,580.10 an ounce on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange, adding to losses as the session progressed. Read more on gold trading.

Part of the decline was possibly due to the fact that the 50-day moving average was getting close to slipping below the 200-day moving average. In some views, say a 5-day chart on FactSet, the 50-day had already fallen below the 200-day. The cross of these two trend lines can foreshadow more losses in some markets; there’s a fairly substantial body of analysis devoted to how the S&P 500 SPX +0.45% trades after its moving averages engage in a death cross, for instance. In the simplest terms, when the near term view of an asset looks worse than a medium term view, bad times are ahead.