The Gold Trader
Full-time Gold trader with 13 years in the market. Former U.S. Ambassador to Zimbabwe. Every week, I explain what's driving Gold and how I'm trading it.
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What they write about
Weekly gold analysis from a full-time gold trader, organised as a macro brief followed by a levels-and-scenarios report for GLD and XAUUSD. Recurring subjects include inflation releases, central bank policy and speeches, real yields and the Treasury market, and how scheduled events map onto the gold market.
- gold
- precious metals
- macro
- inflation
- central banks
- technical levels
Recent examples: Why Gold needs AI stress (just not too much) · Two inflation reports this week decide whether the Fed hikes again in October [GOLD MARKET MOVERS: Oct 07-09]
Written from The Gold Trader’s own published post titles and openings in Sep 11, 2026. It describes the subjects the newsletter covers, not its views, and is not investment advice.
Growth history
Subscribers (thousands, nightly)
120K on Sep 10, 2026 → 121K on Oct 20, 2026
Followers (thousands, nightly)
Rank in Substack’s finance leaderboard: #16 today · #16 a week ago · #15 a month ago
Stats worth sharing
Tracked since Sep 10, 2026 — 41 daily snapshots so far. The card below is built from what we track and refreshes nightly.
- Percentile
- Top 4%
- Best rank seen
- #13
- Rank, 30 days
- −1 place
- Subscribers added
- +1.0K
- Followers added
- +1.1K
- Posts
- 9
- Reactions per post
- 10
- Reactions tracked
- 243
of 525 ranked finance newsletters
on Sep 17, 2026
since tracking began
since tracking began
last 30 days
average, recent posts
across 25 posts
Most-reacted post we have seen: A Treasury story: how the government sells and buys the same bonds — 20 reactions on Aug 23, 2026.
Recent posts
- Why Gold needs AI stress (just not too much)
Every week I do the work you don't have time for - macro, ETF flows, futures positioning, options walls - and turn it into a single playbook: why Gold is moving, who's on the other side of your trade, and the precise levels to mark on your chart. 📰 PART 1: THE MACRO BRIEF Gold had two completely different halves of the week. September CPI rose 0.6% for the month and 3.7% from a year earlier with gasoline accounting for more than half of the monthly CPI increase. Core also came in above forecast. Yield rose on the news and the dollar hit an 18-month high. Gold fell to 4073. Thursday’s…
- Two inflation reports this week decide whether the Fed hikes again in October [GOLD MARKET MOVERS: Oct 07-09]
⚡ THE WEEK IN 2 MIN: Last week, strong auctions and lower yields reduced the pressure on Gold and helped it break higher. Gold moved up to 4207 on Friday and reached 4217 on Monday Oct 12. Then Hammack, Goolsbee, Kashkari and Waller all made the case for more hikes. With inflation expectations at the highest since May and diesel inventories at a record seasonal low, the hawkish argument is now fairly easy to make. Bowman, Jefferson and Williams were more cautious, citing potential weakness in the labor market. Even so, the market pricing moved toward the hawks. FedWatch now puts the…
- Gold needs to clear one level before this bounce means anything
Every week I do the work you don't have time for - macro, ETF flows, futures positioning, options walls - and turn it into a single playbook: why Gold is moving, who's on the other side of your trade, and the precise levels to mark on your chart. 📰 PART 1: THE MACRO BRIEF 🎭 PART 2: FOLLOWING THE MONEY ( Who’s buying, who’s selling) Last week’s setup mostly played out as expected: early rallies got sold, and 4200–4227 stopped Friday’s move - buyers still haven’t cleared this main resistance. Here’s what was happening beyond the price action. Western investors were selling. Hedge funds cut…
- If the US economy can handle this, maybe rates should be higher still?
⚠️ Heads up traders! This is PART 1 of my weekly Gold Insider report. Full flow breakdown, technical key levels, and my trade ideas will drop tomorrow. PART 1: THE MACRO BRIEF In the movie Inception , DiCaprio gets hired do to something seemingly impossible: he has to plant an idea into one person’s mind so that person believes they came up with it themselves. But the problem is that he cannot just tell that person what to think - obviously the person knows where the idea came from. For the idea to stick, they have to reach it through their own lived experience. The Fed now has the version of…
- Ctrl+F: the words to search for in Wednesday's Fed minutes [GOLD MARKET MOVERS: Oct 07-09]
This post is live and will be updated as the week develops and new data and news drop. Please check your TG channel throughout the week for XAUUSD levels updates. ⚡ THE WEEK IN 2 MIN: Last week, Williams, Jefferson and Bowman pushed back against October hikes, and the market cut the odds to roughly ~20% . Then this week some fairly hot inflation data dropped - ISM services prices paid hit 74.0 , the highest reading since 2022. Every industry in the survey reported higher prices. Last week’s ISM manufacturing prices index was also high at 77.9 . Almost nothing changed in Fed pricing. October…
- How the bond market is doing the Fed's tightening for free
Every week I do the work you don't have time for - macro, ETF flows, futures positioning, options walls - and turn it into a single playbook: why Gold is moving, who's on the other side of your trade, and the precise levels to mark on your chart. 📰 PART 1: THE MACRO BRIEF October hike odds went full circle. December is still locked in We’ve had a month of hike odds drama, but ended up roughly where we started. On September 2 , the odds of a back-to-back hike in October were ~18% . By Oct 06 , they were ~70%. By Friday they were back ~23%. December pricing barely moved though and the odds of…
- How to survive a week where every macro input is working against Gold [GOLD MARKET MOVERS: Sep 29- Oct 02]
This post is live and will be written as the week develops and new data and news drop. Please check your TG channel throughout the week for XAUUSD levels updates. ⚡ THE WEEK IN 2 MIN: Gold dropped over 3% on Monday to its lowest level since August 5. Several macro things are pushing in the same direction at once: The market keeps pricing in more hikes. The 2-year yield is approaching 5%. October hike odds have risen to 70–75%, from about 58% a week ago. At the long end, yields are rising too. The 30-year Treasury yield is at its highest since 2004 after weak bond auctions last week. Real…
- The inflationary mindset: the Fed's new worry
Every week I do the work you don't have time for - macro, ETF flows, futures positioning, options walls - and turn it into a single playbook: why Gold is moving, who's on the other side of your trade, and the precise levels to mark on your chart. 📰 PART 1: THE MACRO BRIEF Strong demand data is keeping the Fed hawkish You know the typical horror movie scene. Someone’s getting scary phone calls all night, they call the police terrified, and the cop calls back and says: “we traced the call... it’s coming from inside the house.” That’s basically the plot twist the US data gave us this week. For…
- The Fed now blames demand, not energy, for inflation [GOLD MARKET MOVERS: Sep 23-25]
This post is live and will be written as the week develops and new data and news drop. Please check your TG channel throughout the week for XAUUSD levels updates. ⚡ THE WEEK IN 2 MIN: Between Sunday and Tuesday, Kashkari, Goolsbee, Musalem and Collins all made roughly the same point: inflation is coming from stronger demand and services , not just energy. Oil is not treated as a one-off problem anymore, which is partially why oil gave back the spike, yet Gold is struggling to recover. And since the Fed now turned its focus on demand, we should watch those numbers too - along with price…
- Less gamma, more drama: why this week’s Gold move could travel further
Every week I do the work you don't have time for - macro, ETF flows, futures positioning, options walls - and turn it into a single playbook: why Gold is moving, who's on the other side of your trade, and the precise levels to mark on your chart. 📰 PART 1: THE MACRO BRIEF 🎭 PART 2: FOLLOWING THE MONEY ( Who’s buying, who’s selling) Before the Fed: futures cut risk, ETFs added $335M The COT report ends on Tuesday, September 15 while the Fed announced its rate decision on Wednesday. This gives us a snapshot of how traders prepared for the meeting. Total open interest fell by 1,328 contracts…
- Dot plot: The median was friendly, the distribution wasn't
⚠️ Heads up traders! This is PART 1 of my weekly Gold Insider report. Full flow breakdown, technical key levels, and my trade ideas will drop tomorrow. I’m a Hitchcock fan, and in his movies he often used a MacGuffin technique. A MacGuffin is an object that every character in a movie would chase - say, some briefcase or some secret documents, whatever. As a viewer, you’d spend the whole movie wondering what’s inside but then the movie ends and it turns out that this object didn’t even remotely matter at all for the plot. Wednesday’s dot plot looks a bit like that. All September traders were…
- Can a rate hike could still be good for Gold? [GOLD MARKET MOVERS: Sep 14-18]
Hello traders! Brent pushed above $100 and diesel just crossed $6 a gallon. Every extra dollar on Brent is adding more pressure on the Fed and the market is now pricing 92% chance of a hike on Wednesday. 10-year real yields are also hitting 2.6% - the level not seen since 2007, and according to World Gold Council, above the level that has been historically associated with faster ETF outflows. Add on top of this, we have the positioning risk. COMEX net longs have been rising and a large chunk of those positions were build before the last weeks of losses. If Wednesday Fed gives us hawkish dots…
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Data: Substack public leaderboards and publication archives, refreshed nightly, plus public beehiiv sitemaps and recommendation pages, refreshed weekly. Source for this page: The Gold Trader. Subscriber counts are Substack’s own rounded public figures, so week-on-week changes move in steps. beehiiv audience sizes are self-reported by the publisher and are not verified. Last snapshot: Oct 20, 2026.