these moves are done to paint the chart e.g. move price in such away that it breaks a certain moving average and triggers selling orders from longs so a larger short can cover its position. BB do this in case they are heavily mispositioned and the price can potentially overrun them as with yesterdays situation pre Comex . The potential for Gold to Jump on bad ( I believe it was) core retails sales was potentially more than $ 10 to $ 15 which would have made a Gold price of 1264 or so which at that point was a potential outbreak to the upside hence the BB would have to supply new shorts as otherwise the price would go even higher etc etc So what do you do, well at any excuse at a moment when Nobody is in the market Globex 10 am EU time you dump a big lot based on some irrelevant figure ( I Believe it was some German economic data that nobody ever looks at BUT was much higher than expected, hence a reason to act) now when the core retails sales figure came out (pretty bad as expected) gold jumped only now from somewhere at 1236 instead of 1255....would the figure been better BB could have slammed gold below 1236 a key support level and would have caused an avalanche of more also seller and hence the BB could have covered a max of paper...this si why I believe they will nota allow the price of Gold to go much higher from here that will only happen when the BB are net long....ciao