In a strengthening bullion bull market, when the short side tries to induce spot price decline attacks, they increasingly get smoked and smothered under higher prices.

During the last three-month run for gold prices higher, you can see many short-side betters buried under higher prices shortly after every red spike sell-off volume spike.

In today's COMEX gold price trading action, we saw a similar short snake bite quickly filled with a decent rally to close the end of this week.

This recent gold rally has undoubtedly been assisted by a relatively weaker fiat US dollar and by lower yields on US bonds since late last year. It has likely also been assisted by robust government central bank gold reserve buying at clips not seen since after World War 2.