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Gold coming off its recent all-time with the precious metal up nearly 15% year-to-date, as investors looking for safe haven assets amid volatility. So it's now the time to get into gold, or has it run its course? We've got Bob Iacono, Path Trading partners, chief market strategist, with us for more. Bob, more room to run with gold?

Hey Maddie, how are you? Uh yes, there is more room to run with gold, uh but your sort of trigger point is Wednesday, right? I mean, you look at all the scenarios that we're going through with a lot of deflationary effects being put in by the administration. Tariffs are inflationary, but deportations could potentially be deflationary. Doge is definitely deflationary. So when you're looking at it from that perspective, there are some triggers that could come during the Fed statement or during the Fed speech that could put downside pressure on gold. But when you look at it medium term, we had a really massive sideways correction. Took about 12 weeks between November 20, well, let's call it early November of 2024 to the beginning of January of 2025. And then we broke back out. That's kind of what I expect here. A lot of people look for corrections to be eight to 10% drops, but there's a such thing with price action experts. I know some, I'm not really one. They call it a sideways correction, and that's what's been happening with gold lately. That shows you that the upside bias is there. I think we're going to get another one of those starting on Wednesday.

What are the remaining upside catalysts for gold at this juncture?

Well, I don't believe in the deflationary story quite frankly, Brad. You know me long enough, at least to know that I like watching The Bachelor. And I think some of the inflationary things that are still in place, and some of them that are going to trigger down the road, tariffs, for example, a lot of people are calling those inflationary. They weren't inflationary in 2017, but they could be in this particular case because 2017 had a long runway of any other causes of inflation. This time, we're sitting at inflation somewhere between 2.3 and 3.1%, depending on what you're looking at, and adding tariffs to that could actually put substantial upside pressure on some parts of the economy. The deflationary impetus is if we actually get onshoring. Gold has a lot of scenarios before it. Not too many of them are bearish. Obviously, you've got stagflation, which would be bullish gold. You have recession, which would be bullish gold. And the potential for inflation to actually kick up with another growth cycle, and if the Fed doesn't respond to that, that's also bullish gold. Looking at the CME Fed watch tool this morning, we still have three to four rate cuts being priced in through the end of 2026. Uh that's implying a recession, and I'm not sure I see that many rate cuts, but gold does.

I wonder too how you're thinking about the relationship between gold and the US dollar. Obviously both are down this morning, and then you've got yields, particularly at the longer end of the curve moving to the upside as well. When you look across asset classes, what does it tell you about where gold is heading?

Well, in reference to gold sort of short to medium term, the overall trend in long-term rates has been lower. Since the inauguration, and I'm not giving credit there, I'm just picking a point in time, the 10 years down around 24, 25 basis points. So that's actually bullish gold. Yes, today we're getting a little reversal of that, but a very little one. So when I look at it from that perspective, you look at the long-term trends, the dollar's long-term trend is really bad. If you look at say a weekly chart of the dollar, it's, it's ugly. And when you look at the potential, I'm not saying this is going to happen, but the potential for countries like Germany to rearm, that's spending, that's strengthening the euro, which could mean weakness in the dollar that we haven't even seen yet.