Precious metals are not doing much moving on Tuesday as most investors are simply holding their positions until the conclusion of this week’s FOMC meeting on Wednesday. Equity markets, on the other hand, are gaining loads of momentum on the back of much better than expected corporate earnings reports. Though there isn’t much economic data expected to be made public this week, a few reports made public through the first two days have given investors something to think about. The contrasting report includes a service-sector report indicating that service-sector activity in the US is down well below average. In contrast, today brought about a US Consumer Confidence report that beat expectations and offered up a bit of a surprise to investors.

The US Dollar has not performed well through the first half of the day on Tuesday, but due to the upbeat nature of the Consumer Confidence report, is up from low-points experienced a day ago. With the FOMC meeting ongoing, I expect that things will remain generally quiet until the post-meeting statement is made sometime tomorrow afternoon.

FOMC Meeting Likely to Yield Much of the Same

While the regular amount of investor attention is being paid to this week’s FOMC meeting, no one is expecting the Fed to make any groundbreaking announcements come tomorrow afternoon. Instead, most investors are simply expecting the FOMC to reiterate their intentions on holding off on any interest rate hikes until global economic conditions improve. If such a statement is delivered, I expect that it will provide the precious metals market with a good bit of underlying support, at least for the near-term.

Unfortunately, however, the value of crude oil has been on the decline as of late and is really hurting the wider market of raw commodities. Despite reports that physical demand for gold and silver is on the rise in Asia for the first time in more than 6 months, crude oil’s decline is doing well to limit the forward progress of precious metals spot values. As we head into the middle parts of this week, it will be interesting to see if gold and silver can move forward, or if crude oil will prevent such forward moves from taking place.