Gold's slide began before the Treasury rally was fully underway, according to ActionForex. That ordering matters. It means the first wave of selling cannot be put down only to the cash-raising that followed Thursday's drop in technology shares.
What makes the session unusual is the direction of yields. Nominal and inflation-adjusted Treasury yields both fell, and gold fell with them, breaking the relationship that normally ties the two together.
Key numbers
- $3,986 gold's intraday low on Thursday, briefly below the $4,000 level
- 4.96% the US 10-year Treasury yield, down about 17 basis points from roughly 5.13%
- 2.64% the inflation-adjusted 10-year yield, down from about 2.76%
- 2.6% the Nasdaq Composite's fall on Thursday, its largest daily decline since June
Money moved into bonds, not into bullion
US technology shares fell again as investors questioned how large-scale AI spending is financed and what it returns. The Nasdaq Composite lost about 2.6% and the S&P 500 about 1.2%, with Nvidia and other semiconductor-related companies among the decliners, ActionForex reported. That selling pushed defensive buyers into US government bonds, which is what drove yields down.
Gold did not take part in that move. Silver fell more steeply still, which ActionForex links to its exposure to industrial demand and growth expectations rather than to safe-haven flows.
In plain words: gold pays no interest, so when the real yield on a government bond falls, the income a holder gives up by owning metal instead of bonds falls too. That normally makes gold easier to hold. But an investor facing losses elsewhere may need cash quickly, and gold is easy to sell, so selling to raise money can override the interest-rate effect for a time.
Forced selling is the explanation, not the evidence
I went through the reports on Thursday's session, and they stop short of confirming forced liquidation. ActionForex says plainly that there is not enough same-day evidence from ETF flows, futures transactions or margin data to show how much of the decline came from leveraged selling.
What the reports do offer is context from before the drop. CFTC data showed managed-money net long positions in COMEX gold futures falling from about 127,400 contracts in late September to 107,100 by 13 October, meaning bullish exposure was already being cut. Those figures stop well before Thursday and say nothing about it.
ActionForex also cites HSBC on how margin-related liquidation can weaken gold's usefulness as a short-term hedge against equity losses, and Invesco on investors selling profitable gold holdings to raise cash in periods of financial stress. Both are descriptions of a mechanism, not measurements of what happened this week.
The second report in the story, from Moomoo, carries the same framing in its headline: liquidation worries overshadowing the Treasury rebound, with gold at the $4,000 threshold. It adds no independent figures.
For now, the clearest fact on the record is the divergence itself. Lower real yields and a bid for Treasuries did not stop gold from trading below $4,000, and nobody in the reports I read can yet say how much of that was investors choosing to sell and how much was investors having to.