February 14, 2006	Tuesday	Muharram 15, 1427

LONDON, Feb 13: Gold fell 1.4 per cent to its lowest in nearly four weeks on Monday after plummeting in the previous session on persistent fund selling, but the drop encouraged jewellers to stock up, dealers said.

Gold’s decline dragged down other precious metals, with platinum falling to a three-week low and silver prices losing nearly 2 per cent.

The market has been rising without any major correction since late last year. This sort of correction was largely anticipated and it could be taken by some as a healthy feature to the market, said Yingxi Yu, analyst at Barclays Capital.

It’s still too early to tell whether this is the start of a downtrend. For now I think the market is still quite well supported.

Gold touched $543.40 an ounce before recovering to $545.80/545.70 by 1008 GMT, against $551.00/551.90 in New York late on Friday.

The metal has fallen more than 5 per cent since climbing to a 25-year high of $574.60 on Feb. 2 on tensions over Iran’s nuclear ambitions. It dropped nearly $15 on heavy fund selling in the US market on Friday.

The benchmark gold futures contract on the Tokyo Commodity Exchange, currently December, fell by the daily 60-yen limit to end at 2,107 yen per gram as a drop in the dollar-based spot position triggered selling by funds and retail investors.

Bullion dealers said the selling was triggered mostly by technical weakness after gold was unable to make any headway above recent peaks.

—Reuters