(Kitco News)—After holding initial support at $3,000 an ounce, gold’s rally continues unabated, ending the week at another record high.
Gold prices are moving within striking distance of $3,100 an ounce. While momentum indicators show growing overbought conditions, analysts say the market continues to benefit from solid fundamental support. Gold is trading at $3,077.30 an ounce, up 0.68% on the day, and is set to end the week with a nearly 2% gain.
Friday also marked the end of the last full trading week of the month and the quarter. Gold prices are up roughly 8% in March and are on track to end the quarter with a 17% gain.
Naeem Aslam, Chief Investment Officer at Zaye Capital Markets, said that while gold has seen a significant rally so far this year, prices still have upside momentum.
“Smart money knows one thing very clearly: a large part of the bad news is already baked into the prices, and there is limited room for further downside. Especially considering the parabolic moves we’ve seen,” he said. “That said, traders must keep in mind that the trade war is not over, which means there are plenty of unknown events still lingering. This suggests that, after a retracement, gold prices may continue to move higher.”
David Morrison, Senior Market Analyst at Trade Nation, noted that gold has pushed into overbought territory; however, levels remain below where they were six weeks ago. He added that investors should be cautious at current prices.
“For now, they seem relatively happy to continue climbing their ‘wall of worry.’ So far, profit-taking has led to only shallow dips, which have been met with fresh buying. But this only increases the probability of a bigger pullback at some stage,” he said.
Tom Bruce, Macro Investment Strategist at Tanglewood Total Wealth Management, said that even at elevated prices, gold remains an attractive safe-haven asset. He explained that gold has only seen shallow corrections due to high levels of economic uncertainty and geopolitical turmoil. In this environment, he continues to expect higher gold prices.
“There’s both a technical and fundamental case for gold to continue higher from here,” he said. “If you look at everything that’s transpiring right now in the world economy, and the way the Trump administration is trying to restructure global trade, it’s creating a lot of uncertainty — and that’s good for gold.”
Looking to next week, some analysts say that $3,100 will be an important level to watch and could signal a near-term top in the market.
“It’s been a really impressive run so far, and I’ve seen little reason in the price action to expect any major trend changes at this point,” said James Stanley, Senior Market Strategist at Forex.com. “That said, chasing prices up here can be a difficult strategy, given how aggressively it has rallied. With the quarterly cut coming early next week and prices still surging over $3,000, I think a pullback could happen in the not-too-distant future. The $3,100 level would make sense as a potential trigger for that.”
Fawad Razaqzada, Market Analyst at StoneX Group, said he could see some profit-taking in the near term and is also watching $3,100 an ounce as a potential top.
“While dip buyers are lurking, a rug pull is becoming increasingly likely at these levels, in my view. When risk appetite turns sour and stocks start falling, people tend to liquidate their profitable long gold positions to free up margin,” he said. “For me, the short-term trigger could be a potential break below the recent low of $3,066, while in a slightly longer-term view, a move below $3,000 would be needed to trigger a more meaningful drop.”
Beyond gold’s technical momentum, its price remains well supported as U.S. economic data continues to highlight slower growth. Next week’s employment data is expected to create some volatility. Analysts say any weakness in the labor market could weigh on equity markets and boost safe-haven demand for gold.
“Payrolls likely lost modest momentum in March amid rising uncertainty around the U.S. economic outlook and DOGE-related layoffs,” said economists at TD Securities.
Beyond economic data, economists will also be watching to see how the world reacts to the implementation of U.S. trade tariffs, which are set to take effect on April 2.
“Key questions will be how broad the tariffs are (will autos, chips, and pharma be included?), when they take effect (immediately? In 30 days?), how much leeway other countries will have to offset some or all of them, and how much influence any market reaction could have on the policy itself,” said analysts at TDS.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.