Gold holds near $4,400 as central banks keep buying at record pace

Gold pushed back above $4,400 a troy ounce this week, holding near record territory as a weakening dollar and unrelenting central-bank purchases continued to underpin the metal heading into closely watched U.S. inflation data due Friday.

Spot prices traded near $4,406 an ounce on Thursday, up modestly from the prior session, after climbing above $4,390 on Wednesday on the back of a softer dollar, which slipped to a four-month low, according to a market summary from Yahoo Finance. Prices had briefly dipped after a stronger-than-expected U.S. jobs report a week earlier tempered bets on near-term Federal Reserve rate cuts, before renewed inflation concerns tied to Middle East tensions pulled gold back up. The metal remains well below its 2026 intraday record, set in January.

Central banks keep buying

The structural support beneath the rally continues to come from central banks, which have been diversifying reserves away from dollar-denominated assets. According to the World Gold Council's latest central bank gold statistics, monetary authorities added a net 23 tonnes to reserves in July, bringing year-to-date purchases to roughly 130 tonnes. Poland has led buying this year with roughly 90 tonnes added, part of a stated plan to build reserves tied to security concerns along NATO's eastern flank. China's central bank has extended its buying streak to 21 consecutive months, adding roughly 60 tonnes so far in 2026. Russia and Turkey were the largest net sellers over the same stretch.

A World Gold Council survey published earlier this year found that 89 percent of central bank reserve managers expect global gold holdings to keep rising over the next 12 months. Central banks have averaged roughly 1,000 tonnes of annual purchases over the past four years, roughly double the pace seen in the decade before, a shift analysts attribute largely to reserve diversification following the freezing of Russian central bank assets after its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Miners and retail demand diverge

Gold-mining stocks have moved to catch up with bullion's advance in recent sessions, according to commodity market data tracked by Trading Economics, even as U.S. retail demand for gold-backed exchange-traded funds has softened this year, a divergence that has been a recurring feature of the 2026 rally.

What's ahead

Traders are now watching Thursday's producer-price report and Friday's consumer price index for signs of whether the Federal Reserve will lean toward cutting or holding rates at its upcoming meeting; a more dovish reading would likely extend gold's advance by weakening the dollar further. Barring a sharp reversal in Fed expectations, analysts tracking the central-bank buying trend expect the metal to remain well supported through the rest of the year, with purchases by monetary authorities projected to approach 750 tonnes for 2026 as a whole.