Gold just had a very bad month. Spot prices fell to roughly $4,022 per ounce on June 11, marking the yellow metal’s lowest level since November 2025. That’s a 13% decline over the past month alone, dragging gold well below the $4,300 range where it had been trying to find support.
The culprit isn’t mysterious. Speculative investors, the leveraged futures traders and momentum chasers who piled into gold during its historic run, are now piling out. A strong US jobs report gave the dollar and Treasury yields a boost, and suddenly a non-yielding asset like gold looked a lot less attractive compared to bonds that actually pay you to hold them.
From record highs to reality check
To understand how we got here, rewind to January 2026. Gold was trading above $5,500 per ounce, a record high that capped a roughly 65% surge throughout 2025. That rally was fueled by inflation fears, central bank buying, and a speculative frenzy that pushed positioning in gold futures to extreme levels.
At $4,022, gold has now given back more than 25% from that peak. For context, gold is still trading at historically elevated levels. But the speed of the unwind tells you something important about who was driving the rally in the first place.
