Precious Metals Rally into the Weekend Close

Gold and silver futures rise in the last hour before CME closes for the weekend. A long position from 16:00 to 16:59 New York time on Fridays earned +3.6 bp in gold (GC, t = 8.4, 60% of Fridays positive, 16 of 17 years) and +6.8 bp in silver (SI, t = 8.9, 17 of 17 years) over 795 Fridays from 2010 to 2026. The same hour on Monday to Thursday, which ends at the same daily 17:00 break, shows nothing in gold (+0.2 bp, t = 1.1). The size of the move follows the length of the closure ahead: zero before the one-hour daily break, +3.7 bp in gold and +6.6 bp in silver before a normal weekend, and +6.6 bp and +16.4 bp before a long weekend such as Easter. It is larger after a falling week and in volatile weeks, and it is not reversed when the market reopens. This points to traders flattening short exposure before they lose the ability to trade, rather than to temporary price pressure. On a retail gold CFD, with a 24-minute window that closes before the broker stops quoting, the trade earned +8.5 R over 63 Fridays from June 2025 to October 2026 after a $0.19 spread and commission (profit factor 1.76, 62% winners), but with t = 1.6 the live-cost evidence is still weak. Here 1 R is the loss at the stop. AI disclosure. The author used Claude (Anthropic), an AI assistant, to write the data-analysis code, todraft and edit the text, to assist with wording and structure, and as a consultative tool for discussingmethodological and technical questions. The research questions and the decisions on what to test and whatto accept are the author’s. The author reviewed, verified, and edited all AI-assisted content and takes fullresponsibility for the content of the paper, including its analysis, results, and conclusions.