The BANK of ENGLAND's asset purchase program – better known as "Quantitative Easing" – was maintained at its £200 billion limit ($318bn) at the Old' Lady's January policy meeting in London, writes Adrian Ash of BullionVault.

Crude oil inclined slightly at the beginning of the week, surrendering some of Friday's drop, on upbeat manufacturing data from China, the world's second largest crude consumer, which outpaced the downbeat data from the U.S. released on Friday.

Gold had a nice little pop yesterday as investors exited the Dollar in reaction to stronger than expected U.S. Prelim GDP data. However, as with the EUR/USD and GBP/USD, gold’s positive momentum fell short of important topside technical barriers, mostly notably $1050/oz and our 3rd tier uptrend line. Investors are now exiting their risk trades today as optimism wanes in the face of negatively mixed data. The S&P futures are also trading off by over -1% and crude over -2%.

Silver

Following gold, the metal inclined, approaching the key resistance level of 76.4% Fibonacci level at 16.85 -previous support- , but we still do believe that the negative effect of the bearish harmonic AB=CD pattern is to start on the intraday basis from the aforesaid areas which meets the broken uptrend line of momentum indication, targeting 15.70 areas over the short term basis. Hence we keep our overview to the downside on the intraday basis.

The trading range for today is among the key support at 15.70 and key resistance now at 17.90.

The general trend is to the upside as far as 12.45 remains intact with targets at 19.40.

Support: 16.60, 16.53, 16.45, 16.35, 16.30
Resistance: 16.72, 16.77, 16.83, 16.90, 16.96

Recommendation: Based on the charts and explanations above our opinion is, selling silver from 16.80 targeting 16.20 and stop loss above 17.30 might be appropriate.