TOKYO, Feb 3 — Gold surged over 5 per cent today, on track for its biggest daily gain since November 2008, while silver also jumped as precious metals staged a comeback after their steepest two-day drop in decades.

Analysts see the bull run continuing and expect the metals to notch fresh record highs later this year.

Spot gold climbed 5.8 per cent to US$4,935.56 (RM19,384) an ounce by 0818 GMT. Yesterday, it hit a low of US$4,403.24, two sessions after peaking at US$5,594.82.

US gold futures for April delivery rose 6.6 per cent to US$4,958.50 per ounce.

“It’s a reasonable call that this is somewhere around fair value potentially, if you consider that we saw a market behaving fairly irrationally for a few weeks there,” said Kyle Rodda, a senior market analyst at Capital.com.

“The current prices take gold and silver back to where they were, early in the second half of January.”

Gold’s spectacular rally saw it smash multiple peaks and log a nearly 13 per cent gain in January, its biggest monthly gain since November 2009, while silver touched an all-time high of US$121.64 last Thursday.

Silver gained 10 per cent to US$87.40 an ounce today, after suffering its biggest one-day loss on record on Friday with a 27 per cent slump. It fell by another 6 per cent yesterday.

The metals had slumped after US President Donald Trump nominated Kevin Warsh to be the next US Federal Reserve chair.

“The markets endorsed Warsh’s nomination by US President Donald Trump as someone relatively credible, and so we saw the dollar move on that basis, and again, that was kind of like the pin that popped the big precious metals,” Rodda said.

CME Group also raised margin requirements on precious metal futures, fuelling last week’s sharp.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics said yesterday the closely-watched employment report for January would not be released this Friday because of a partial shutdown of the federal government.

In other metals, spot platinum climbed 5.7 per cent to US$2,242.55 per ounce after hitting a record high of US$2,918.80 on January 26, while palladium was up 5.3 per cent at US$1,811.39. — Reuters