Gold consolidates recent strong gains to multi-year tops, around $1500 mark

• A slight improvement in the global risk sentiment capped further gains.
• Dovish Fed expectations might now help limit any meaningful downside.

Gold lacked any firm directional bias on Thursday and seesawed between tepid gains/minor losses, consolidating the recent upsurge to fresh multi-year tops.
 
Against the backdrop of the recent escalation in the US-China trade tensions, growing pessimism over the global economic growth outlook provided a strong boost to traditional safe-haven assets and turned out to be one of the key factors behind the precious metal's strong rally from the post-FOMC swing lows to $1400 mark.

Gold continues to benefit from the global flight to safety

A series of dovish central-bank surprises on Wednesday underscored the market concerns and reinforced by a fresh leg of a free-fall in the US Treasury bond yields, which further benefitted the non-yielding yellow metal and collaborated to the overnight sharp up-move to levels beyond the key $1500 psychological mark.
 
However, the overnight solid rebound in the US equity markets, coupled with a modest pickup in the US Dollar demand - which tend to undermined demand for the dollar-denominated commodity - kept a lid on any strong follow-through up-move, rather prompted traders to take some profits off the table.
 
A strong follow-through recovery in the US bond yields continued exerting some downward pressure on Thursday, albeit the downside is likely to remain cushioned as market participants might have already started pricing in possibilities of two or more Fed rate cuts by the end of this year.
 
Thursday's second-tier US economic releases - the usual initial weekly jobless claims and Final Wholesale Inventories - seems unlikely to produce any meaningful trading opportunities, leaving Gold at the mercy of the broader market risk sentiment and the USD price dynamics.

Technical levels to watch