Trump's hawkish rhetoric propelled international oil prices higher intraday, prompting the market to quickly trade the risk of "double-dip inflation" and further cooling expectations for a Federal Reserve rate cut. The simultaneous strengthening of US Treasury yields and the dollar directly increased the holding costs of non-interest-bearing assets like gold and silver, leading to a concentrated sell-off of precious metals bulls.
However, this decline was not solely driven by fundamentals; it resembled a liquidity cleansing. Previously, gold bull positions were highly concentrated, with the market generally betting that geopolitical risks would continue to support gold prices. When technology stocks and semiconductors corrected simultaneously, cross-asset funds faced margin pressure and often prioritized liquidating the most liquid and previously profitable assets, making gold and silver the preferred destinations for rapid capital withdrawal.
Meanwhile, highly valued technology assets such as Samsung Electronics and Nvidia came under pressure, and the South Korean 3x leveraged ETF
KORU suffered a sharp intraday drop, reflecting a contraction in market risk exposure. After precious metals broke through key technical levels, a chain of sell orders from quantitative funds and trend trading strategies were triggered, exacerbating short-term volatility.
The core of this market movement was not the disappearance of safe-haven demand, but rather that changes in interest rate expectations and deleveraging temporarily overshadowed traditional safe-haven logic.
