Gold Price Outlook September 2026: Selloff or Breakout?

Craig (00:00)
Greetings, everyone from Sprott Money, SprottMoney.com. It is now September. two-thirds of the way through the year 2026. they say time speeds up as you're getting older, and man, am I ever getting older? it's time to start a new month. And as we do that at Sprott Money, we always start with our precious metal projection program. And that's what we're doing this month. I'm your host, Craig Hempke, and joining me as usual is technical.

Analyst Extraordinaire Christopher Vermeulen of the Technicaltraders.com. Chris, my friend, thank you for joining me.

Chris Vermeulen (00:36)
thanks for having me, Craig. Always a pleasure.

Craig (00:39)
All right, two first things first. this is from SprottMoney.com. So you want to make sure you thank them by buying the dip whenever you see one, perhaps,

SprottMoney.com or call them at 888-861-0775. I also want to plug my guest here. it's not the first book he's written, but he's got a whole new series of books you might want to check out. And you're making an appearance in public in a couple of weeks. tell us about all that stuff, Chris.

Chris Vermeulen (01:08)
Yeah, sure. Well, I recently just published a book called After the Rally. It talks about more or less the traditional investing methods. There's about seven different methods almost if you're investing in in in anything really, you're probably doing at least three or five of these things. And I really just cover all the different tactics between dividend reinvesting, buy and hold, active trading, all kinds of different things that most people do.

And I show the the pros and cons and how those strategies actually become much more dangerous. People don't know all the hidden risks to these as you get a little bit older in life and get closer to retirement or are

Craig (01:43)
For sure.

Chris Vermeulen (01:44)
retired. So after the rally talks about you know what happens after things eventually do blow up and reset. And unfortunately, a lot of people are caught off guard. And a lot of these things people do and these risks, they don't know about it until it's actually too late. So trying just kind of prepare people with that. And I also launched a nine book series.

a library talking about asset revesting and it goes into detail. Each little book is factored on all of these seven different strategies that most people do as investing. And it just goes over them in fine details and it kind of shows you how to kind of navigate these markets and the pros and cons and when it's, you know, proper to kind of switch gears and move away from some of these strategies as you kind of get into your later years. So yeah.

Craig (02:29)
Kind of a public service in a sense. And I mean, I just think that's great. Put that kind of information out, sharing what you know. and you're gonna be at the money show in Toronto in a couple of weeks.

Chris Vermeulen (02:39)
Yeah, I'll be at the Toronto Money Show. I'm doing the the main event on September twenty-fourth. I think it's around three forty-five. It's two hours. Talk about the markets, metals, teach a trading strategy. so it's gonna be pretty exciting. Earlier in the day, I'll be also doing a forty-five minute presentation talking about the markets from a different angle. So lots going on in September down in Toronto at the money show.

Craig (03:00)
There wasn't enough reason to already go. Now you can go and see Chris fromulin in the flesh.

Chris Vermeulen (03:04)
Yeah.

Craig (03:05)
all right, my friend. and for everybody watching, Chris and I are recording this on Thursday, the third of September. And I point that out because we've had some specific events, just today, even. Looks like another yen intervention by the Bank of Japan. Has strengthened the yen, weakened the dollar. The metals are rallying and reclaiming most of their early week losses. However, as Pee Wee Herman

Used to say everybody's got a big butt. And so the big butt on this one is tomorrow is non-farm payroll day in the US ahead of a three-day weekend. So as you're watching this on maybe Friday the fourth or over the weekend, just make want to make it known that we're recording

Chris Vermeulen (03:51)
Ha ha

Craig (03:51)
this before the volatility that's coming on Friday. So with that, Chris.

when we recorded our last projection back in early August, metals were still kind of scraping around, trying to find a bottom around maybe

Chris Vermeulen (04:06)
Mm-hmm.

Craig (04:07)
4,000 or 4,100 in gold, somewhere below 60 in silver. The GDX was down 70, 75, and we had just this fantastic month. We're gonna talk about whether that's just a bounce or whether that's a start of a new move higher. let's start with gold. I see the chart right there. You're ready to go.

Chris Vermeulen (04:25)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's there's definitely a lot going on in the the precious metal space. And depending on the time frame, the type of trader you are, if you're a trader or you're a long-term investor, different time frames, they all these charts all speak differently depending on your style. But there is no doubt we have seen gold pausing. It was struggling here at the four thousand mark, debating if it was going to find support and bounce. And it has. And we've seen this huge move, very strong move to the upside.

You know, it looks really good from a short-term trader standpoint. Gold, silver, and miners are all in an uptrend. you know, when we look at gold from kind of a bit of a longer-term perspective, we still have very significant lower kind of highs overall. Now, so that's a little bit of a a neutral kind of negative bias, right? We have lower lows as well for gold.

Craig (05:16)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Vermeulen (05:17)
So it is technically from a longer-term standpoint still trending down.

Our long-term moving average, the green moving average, which is the 150 day, is still sloping down. The shorter term moving averages are still all below it. So we have this mixed signal, which is long-term trend analysis is still to the downside, short term is to the upside. So we end up with a mixed signal. And so now we are in this phase here where we need to figure out, or we don't need to figure out, we need the charts to figure out.

Craig (05:49)
Right.

Chris Vermeulen (05:49)
Is

this going to build a launch pad, potentially a bull flag formation and eventually break and kickstart a new massive rally in gold? Or is it going to bounce and roll over? And are we going to see it go back down and struggle and sell off? And so that's kind of where we are. We have this mixed signal, right? If you're a short-term trader,

Craig (06:07)
Yeah.

Chris Vermeulen (06:08)
you're you're probably pretty excited and bullish and potentially long. Me as a long-term investor, the way I invest in precious metals is I when gold and silver

Turn a major corner to the upside. I buy physical metals and I plan to hold it for many years for these big kind of super cycles to the upside. So I'm waiting to reload and get back in from that perspective, not the short-term trading perspective. And since this is the monthly projection, let's take a look at the monthly chart of gold. And if we do zoom, zoom in here or zoom out on gold, we can see we've had this very big pullback in the market. Now, the market loves to do.

Complex correction. Well, it's not that complex. It's called a complex correction, but it's just an A B C correction, which means an A B C correction. And so that's what we're waiting to see. Is gold bottoming and going to build a launch pad and start to scream higher? If gold has found a bottom based

Craig (07:04)
Yeah.

Chris Vermeulen (07:05)
on the Fibonacci sequence here, it is showing where we're going to see gold move to the upside. If it builds a base and starts and continues to move higher.

The next stop for gold is about 8,000. 7,900 in change is going to be the next stop, which is pretty exciting. The flip side of that is if we take this recent big rally up and we go to the high, this is going to give us the potential pullback levels for gold. So we've already come down to the the 318, which is a typical support level, and now it's bounced. And if gold does for some reason roll over and start to sell off again.

The 50% correction is going to be the next sweet spot, which is about 3,600.

Craig (07:47)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Vermeulen (07:47)
And if it does get down there, to me, that is a screaming long-term buy. It could, it still has potential to unwind a little further. But overall, from that point forward, then I think it's going to eventually turn around and start to have a very big rally back up into the 8,000 and change again, a long-term multi-year bull market. So right now, when we look at gold, it has those mixed signals depending.

You know, long term is still technically down, short term is still up, and we're waiting for confirmation for my strategy before I want to, you know, dump a bunch of money in, pick up a lot of physical metals and go back to that route. So that's kind of where we're at.

we're still slow we're still down. But the short term, like twenty day, fifty day moving averages, short term traders are long and trading this, I'm sure, to the upside.

Craig (08:34)
Let's give everybody something to watch. I I see those moving average lines on there. what would be the significance if by tomorrow's close, after all of the US data and the dollar goes wild and the bond market does, you know, all that stuff. what would be the significance in your eyes if we say crawled back above that 150 day or I'm, you know, some people watch the 200 day? If we close back above there into the weekend, or conversely, if we started breaking down.

toward what I assume is probably the fifty day or the twenty day.

Chris Vermeulen (09:06)
Right. So when I when I look at moving averages, pretty much like the the fifty day or longer. So the fifty day, the hundred and fifty day, the two hundred day, those I I don't really look at those as levels like, hey, if price closes above it, boom, it's a buy signal.

Craig (09:21)
Okay.

Chris Vermeulen (09:22)
If it closes below it, they're too long, they're too slow. You just want to know which direction they're sloping. So up or down. So is the trend the under longer term underlying trend is it up or down? And then you just want to

It it will trade through it. It'll constantly chop through those longer moving averages. So when you get down to like a 20 day, a five day moving average, you can start to look at those as critical or the 10 day critical, like short term bounce support levels or resistance

Craig (09:48)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Vermeulen (09:49)
levels. So the longer ones, you just have to expect it's going to come down and it's going to probably move through it a bunch of times. I I wouldn't use a long term moving average as being like, hey, if it closed above the green moving average on Friday on a close, I wouldn't be like,

Everybody load up, right? Like it's it's just it's just

Craig (10:06)
Yeah.

Chris Vermeulen (10:07)
kind of that. So that's the way I look at those moving averages. I mean, if we if we see the stock market or the the gold market close right back up at these highs, that'll be a very strong sign, obviously. I mean it's gonna be very interesting to see how we close out this week with the big economic data coming out on the fourth. So

overall, yeah, moving averages, they're just generally a guide of underlying direction. And the

Craig (10:29)
Yeah. Okay.

Chris Vermeulen (10:31)
shorter the moving average, the shorter the time frame trader you are. And if you're using a long one, you're you're looking at the bigger view and you're playing kind of a rising falling tide versus trying to play the waves, the smaller waves.

Craig (10:42)
My my old man eyes kind of start to see like a reverse or an inverse head and shoulder on there too. Do you do you put much stock into those kind of traditional I don't know, technical formations? I mean you got a shoulder over there, you know, when we came crashing.

Chris Vermeulen (10:57)
Where yeah, where where

where are you looking? Are are you are you thinking like this

is a shoulder ahead and it's making another shoulder and we might have like a neckline?

Craig (11:01)
That yeah. Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah, kinda.

Chris Vermeulen (11:08)
Yeah, that I mean that's possible. If if this it's a little out of balance right now because this is a huge multi-month shoulder, a multi-month head. But if

Craig (11:17)
Yeah.

Chris Vermeulen (11:17)
gold if gold does what ideally we'd want to see, which is it trades sideways and it builds a launch pad here, it would start to

It would start to make a nice bigger shoulder. And then when

Craig (11:28)
Yeah.

Chris Vermeulen (11:28)
it starts to break and run out, it would actually be a very balanced pattern. And that's what I'm looking for. We want to see

Craig (11:31)
Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Vermeulen (11:33)
gold trade in the whole precious metal space trade sideways so that the moving averages start to on average start to move up, price starts trading above them more, and the chart builds a bull flag or a pennant formation or some type of bullish price action going forward. So yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Craig (11:48)
That everybody can see. Yeah. The more people that see it, the better, right?

all right, Chris. let's look at the shares, the gold shares. the GDX might be a good proxy for that. I remember last summer, we were watching gold, you know, make these moves of twenty percent rallies, then consolidate for three or four months, then twenty percent rallies, you went up all the way back to twenty twenty four. And

Chris Vermeulen (12:10)
Yeah.

Craig (12:10)
we were stuck in one of those consolidations last summer.

at a below maybe thirty four hundred in gold from April to August, but the shares took off August the first, and then the metals took off September the first. Well, here we are. The shares clearly took off in August. Maybe it's just coincidence, but what do you see in that GDX chart? What should we be watching?

Chris Vermeulen (12:31)
Yeah, I think I just to kind of pull those two charts up to show people I think what you were talking about there, Craig, was we saw gold trading sideways through this range. Yet w when we look at miners, miners actually kind of broke out. I mean, they still kind of traded sideways in the range a little bit, but overall we saw pretty much much before, about a month before gold, we saw miners break out and run and led the way.

And that that can be seen as a very bullish sign, right? Money's moving into the leverage play. They're like, gold's about to move, get me into the metals. So we saw miners move first, and then gold followed suit. And so if we were to kind of fast forward to kind of where we are today, we've got obviously miners, miners have done it something very interesting. They have had a very strong impulse wave. They have broken

Craig (13:19)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Vermeulen (13:20)
one, two, three significant highs.

And tip technically, if you break two previous highs, the first pause or pullback can be a buying opportunity because it's gonna go higher. Once you bro break through two resistance levels, Craig, that means you've got enough momentum that the trend has changed. You're not just hitting your head on resistance

Craig (13:39)
Yeah.

Chris Vermeulen (13:40)
and getting rejected. You're like, no, we just ate up all that resistance. We busted through it. And so the miners have done that. And so now we're we wanna see are they gonna hold up or are they just gonna give back all the gains?

At this point, they're holding up. They're getting a nice bounce this week. And we are seeing gold. Gold hasn't broken, for example, this significant high right over here. Miners have

broke that. The same

Craig (14:02)
Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Vermeulen (14:04)
significant high for gold, gold hasn't broken it yet. So gold is lagging, but it is moving up very nicely. So this is a very strong sign for the precious metals space because miners are leading the way. And again, we just need to see proof. Is this going to fizzle out?

Or is this

Craig (14:21)
Right.

Chris Vermeulen (14:22)
the real deal? And to me, being patient is is critical. I don't I don't jump into emotional trades. I I sit on my hands. It is boring as hell. Nobody likes to do it. But I wait and I

Craig (14:33)
Ha ha ha

Chris Vermeulen (14:35)
wait. And I don't care if I if I miss a bottom dramatically. I

Craig (14:39)
Right.

Chris Vermeulen (14:39)
don't try to pick a top. I'll let it the price roll over. I'm looking for that sweet spot in the middle. I just want to put my money to work when it's going to be earning a return and growing. And I just

don't want to be involved in something if it's not. So right now I'm in limbo in the precious metal space. I have a bullish bias. it looks like things want to go higher, but I'm not jumping the gun just yet. I I I like to jump on the train

Craig (15:00)
Right.

Chris Vermeulen (15:00)
as it's leaving the station, not jumping on it and you don't know which way it's going to go.

Craig (15:06)
That's a great, great metaphor. all right, let's just do one more chart. if the GD if the GDX,

Chris Vermeulen (15:11)
Sure.

Craig (15:15)
you know, has me going, hey, maybe we're just starting something, then we look at silver. Talk about sitting on your hands a little bit. We got gold going great, the shares going great, copper going great, right? But silver, heck, silver couldn't even get above its 100-day

Chris Vermeulen (15:30)
Hm. Silver's lagging.

Craig (15:32)
moving average. All right, so.

What are we gonna do here, Chris?

Chris Vermeulen (15:36)
Yeah, sil silver's interesting. Like usually usually it it wants to perform better. I'm I'm surprised it's

Craig (15:42)
Yeah.

Chris Vermeulen (15:43)
it's not it's not actually blasting higher. I honestly think I think there was so much excitement and such big gains made earlier, well, late last year and early this year. And then of course, like this fifty percent drop in price. I think I think it it was a huge blow to a lot of people's psyche.

Craig (16:01)
She's kind of freak

people out, yeah.

Chris Vermeulen (16:03)
Yeah, I think people, you know, if you got a big account, right? You you a lot of people probably lost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on that drop in like two or three days. Like it it was

Craig (16:12)
Right.

Chris Vermeulen (16:13)
pretty devastating, right? That does a big blow. And you're it makes you realize how volatile silver is, how easy it is to give all these gains back. You feel like a hero one day, the next day you're like, I'm an idiot. How did I not lock in profits, right? And so I think that is echoed through the price over the last, well, since that drop is people are

a little more nervous to get involved and they're not they're scared to commit to it because they can see how how quickly something can move. And so I think we're seeing that with the miners. I think money's been flowing to miners. It's been flowing to gold. Again, when we when we were to just to look back, you know, gold golden miners kind of put in a high over here. And you know, gold is trading lower. Miners have already broken that level. And silver

Craig (16:54)
Yeah.

Chris Vermeulen (16:55)
is really actually stuck like right under resistance, right through this

Craig (16:58)
Yeah.

Chris Vermeulen (16:59)
this huge, huge support level. And it's it's just not

It's not finding a bid yet. So, but this is kind of natural to silver. We do in some cases see gold and miners take off, and then silver's a late bloomer, suddenly out of nowhere, just takes off, and then

Craig (17:15)
Yeah.

Chris Vermeulen (17:16)
it outperforms them all, right? And so that's why I like to follow physical gold pricing because I find it's the most trustworthy, it's the most stable. And I also think money is flowing more into gold assets like physical gold and gold stocks, because I think this is more of a

we've got more of a global problem going on, right? We've got yields spiking, we've got people not trusting the bond US bond market. We've got people trying to get away from the dollar, they're worried the dollar is gonna collapse. And so I think, you know, big investors and and in

Craig (17:48)
Yeah.

Chris Vermeulen (17:49)
and global countries, they don't wanna load up on silver. They want to move to something more stable and and that's gold. And so the fact that gold's doing really well and outperforming dramatically.

Is telling me this is more of a global thing. It's not a it's not quite as much a speculative move at this point. If silver was rocketing higher, I'd say this is definitely more a speculative and

Craig (18:09)
Yeah.

Chris Vermeulen (18:10)
I wouldn't I probably wouldn't trust the spike as much. But the big sister of big brother gold is really getting accumulated and moving up.

Craig (18:19)
I to your point, it's hard to see gold going back to five thousand or something and copper trading at seven dollars a pound and still vr still just farting around down there at sixty-five, you know, that all of a sudden, like you said, it'll just boom. You're like, wait a second, how did silver get to eighty-five? it

Chris Vermeulen (18:35)
Yeah, yeah.

Craig (18:36)
it it you know, and the other thing you mentioned too, I I watch I track the Comex open interest every day. It's back down to like a hundred and three thousand contracts, which is the lowest since the middle part of July.

It used to be, Chris, the peak was 244,000 contracts a few years ago. So it's like what you said, everybody just kind of got their their wings clipped, you know, they got their fingertips burned. metaphor daddy over here. it is they've

Chris Vermeulen (19:05)
Yeah.

Craig (19:06)
been and so I I think you're right. I it's just like, well, you know, I'm just gonna wait for a little more evidence before I start getting excited about this silver stuff again. Is there something?

Chris Vermeulen (19:14)
Yeah, well

Craig (19:16)
What would you watch to think, okay, this might be a trigger point?

Chris Vermeulen (19:19)
Well, I mean, when we when we look at silver here, the the big there's there's this huge pivot point right through here, right? This is really critical. Like this was obviously a massive support level, a massive support level, another

Craig (19:32)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Vermeulen (19:32)
one, another one. It broke down and hit resistance and now we're back up here. So silver's really gotta get to me, silver's kinda gotta get back above seventy five and hold up there.

And it does look like it wants to go there. When you look at the the chart action, I mean it has a nice series of bull flags, right? It it popped, it paused, it rallied, it paused,

Craig (19:50)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Chris Vermeulen (19:52)
it rallied, it's paused. The next move should bring it up to probably about 75, which which is actually another resistance area just on the chart. When you look through here, 75, 76 area. This is there's

Craig (20:05)
Yeah.

Chris Vermeulen (20:06)
a there's a lot of a lot of trading that goes right through here. So it'll it's naturally going to run into some resistance. And

So it still has a quite a bit of work to do from long-term standpoint. Like the 150-day moving average is rolling over. It's it's headed down fairly sharply. The 50 and 20 day are clearly below it. And so silver's really just starting to kick into an uptrend from a short-term, you know, swing trader standpoint. This looks like it's going to bounce and head up to 75. The question is, 75 is going to be potentially that next major resistance area. And it could still roll over from there. So

again, just like gold and miners, we want to see silver move higher. And or worst case scenario, we really just want to see silver trade sideways and build a flat launch pad. And the longer it trades sideways, when it breaks out of that move, it'll have a very strong move. Hopefully it'll break to the upside. But yeah, it just needs time. Like that's the whole thing with the precious metal space. They're showing signs of strength, but it's to me, it's not there long enough to say,

Is this a bear market rally? Like technically, they're gold and silver are still in a technical bear market. Long-term moving averages are down. It's a series of lower highs and lower lows. We're in a bear market, and this could be a bear market rally, a sucker's rally. And it could very easily roll over for whatever reason, we don't know, and head lower. And that's what I want to be aware of. I've I've tried picking bottoms in the past, some have worked exceptionally well, but I've also lost my shirt.

Craig (21:35)
Me too.

Chris Vermeulen (21:36)
Blown up accounts, buying low and saying, this is it's gonna I'll just buy more and then eventually, you know, it just keeps falling and you get into a bear market or whatever. It's so that's what I want to avoid. So we just need time. Let

Craig (21:49)
Yeah.

Chris Vermeulen (21:49)
silver and gold figure itself out. There's tons of upside. I mean, gold and silver will go up long term. It's just question comes down to how do you wanna navigate it, you know.

Craig (21:58)
and the pragmatic old man grandpa will add one last thought to that. don't you feel like everybody just focuses on 120? we got to 120, 120. Silver ended last year at 71, up 123% or something like that on the year. If

Chris Vermeulen (22:17)
Yeah.

Craig (22:17)
it just ends this year at 71, after a year like that, I

Chris Vermeulen (22:22)
Yeah.

Craig (22:23)
mean that would be fantastic, really.

Anything above 71 is just like, my gosh, not 121. It's 71 was the bogey from the end of the year last year. So

Chris Vermeulen (22:33)
Yeah, yeah.

Craig (22:34)
anyway, we're hanging in there. I hope you hang in there, my friend. These talks are just, I just look forward to them every month because I always always tell me something I haven't thought about. And I'm sure everybody else feels that way too. So thank you so much for

Chris Vermeulen (22:45)
Move late.

Craig (22:46)
once again bringing us up to speed.

Chris Vermeulen (22:48)
No problem. Thanks for having me and yeah, take care.

Craig (22:51)
And from every everybody at Sprott Money, hey, just all we ask is that you hit the like or the subscribe button on the way out. It's gonna be a crazy month of September. But we're gonna have a bunch of content as we go through the month, and you don't want to miss any of it. Hitting the like or the subscribe will get you a notification every time something new is posted. So hit smash that button on your way out, and then keep an eye on this channel as a very busy and volatile month of September lies ahead.