The charts are starting to say that gold is near a bottom, but after more than two years of being wrong, technicians have become reluctant to listen.
Gold has been trending lower since peaking above $1,900 an ounce in September 2011. It fell nearly 40% to the June 2013 lows around $1200 an ounce, before bouncing. After a near two-month rally through late August, gold turned lower again, and now sits just above its June lows, settling at $1,235.70 on Friday.
Mark Arbeter, chief technical strategist at S&P Capital IQ, said while there are some signs suggesting a big rally could be in the works, he’d rather not make that call, yet.
“I’d rather sit on the fence here. I’ve tried to pick too many bottoms,” Mr. Arbeter said. “If you’re on the wrong side [of a bear market], it kind of just wears you out.”

There’s an old Wall Street saying, that Warren Buffett has professed to follow: The time to buy is when no one else wants to. Mr. Arbeter acknowledged that his reluctance to call a bottom may be one of the signs suggesting gold may have finally reached one. But he’d still rather wait for more technical evidence, because the downside risk seems too great.
“What we need to do here in the near term is reverse this downtrend by breaking above this bearish trendline since August,” Mr. Arbeter said. That trendline currently extends to about $1,300 an ounce.
To snap the long-term trend, however, he said gold has to get above the August high, “which would complete a very large double-bottom” pattern to suggest the bear market was over.
“Then the serious money will start buying,” Mr. Arbeter said.
If gold falls below the June low around $1,180 an ounce, “there’s a real possibility we to go $1,000 or lower,” Mr. Arbeter said. That would reflect at least a 19% decline from current levels.
But what makes him thing a rally is more likely is the bullish technical outlook of the gold miner sector on the weekly charts.
The Market Vectors Gold Miners ETF (GDX) fell below its June low of $22.21 last month, and hit a five-year low of $20.56 last week. But while prices have made a lower low, some widely-followed momentum indicators, such as the Relative Strength Index, have been trending higher for the last six months.
Chart watchers believe this bullish technical divergence suggests downward momentum has run out of steam. Eventually prices should follow momentum higher, they say.
“That’s a classic set up for a reversal,” Mr. Arbeter said. “The mining stocks tend to underperform during downtrends, then at times can outperform when gold is going higher.”
“That could be a sign that the overall gold market is bottoming,” he said. While he would be reluctant to aggressively scoop up gold, if he had to do something now, he might have a “nibble.”