Gold ended the week with exceptional resilience, surging sharply despite a rare and disruptive CME outage that halted futures trading for nearly ten hours across equity, bond, and commodity markets. The interruption officially attributed to a “cooling issue” at a data center occurred during the quiet Thanksgiving period, but it nevertheless underscored a structural vulnerability in global price discovery: precious metals markets remain heavily dependent on the CME futures complex, with limited redundancy in OTC and LBMA market-making.

“If you catch 100 red fire ants as well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing will happen. However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other. The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar.