Gold rises on softer dollar, on track for fourth weekly drop

Energy-driven inflation should be rocket fuel for gold, but we're seeing four weeks of selling instead. This tells me the paper markets are completely disconnected from fundamentals. The dollar weakness finally showing up in Friday's session, but the real story is who's been dumping. Retail stackers don't create four-week selloffs. This smells like institutional profit-taking and algorithm trading. Meanwhile, central banks keep buying physical at these levels. The divergence between paper price action and physical demand fundamentals is getting extreme. Every weekly drop just makes the eventual snap-back more violent when the paper games end.