US MIDDAY: gold stays down

Gold remained under pressure trading below a near-term technical support level early on Tuesday due to a weaker euro, with investors betting against a meeting of European leaders this week doing much to tackle the region's debt crisis. Platinum tracked gold lower, shrugging off news of a fresh production outage in South Africa.
The euro remained clear of last week's four-month lows but was stuck in negative territory against the dollar as worries about Greek politics and Spanish banking problems kept the currency under pressure. Spot gold was down 0.63 percent at $1,576.21 an ounce at 13:45 pm (1745 GMT).
US gold futures for June delivery were down $6.1 or 0.38 percent at $1,582.6 but off an intraday low of $1,572 hit earlier. While prices are up from the December lows revisited last week, bullion was still on a weak technical footing, trading below its 14-day moving average.
Some US investors were already focusing on the long Memorial Day holiday weekend, but most were bracing for a possible recovery in the euro if an informal European summit in Brussels on Wednesday agrees on a pan-European bond issue aimed at raising much-needed cash to bolster Greece's banking system.
Looking at the likely course of the gold prices this week, options on June COMEX futures that expire on Thursday show investors are divided on the gold's chances of breaking and staying above $1,600 an ounce. Platinum was in the red even after news of further industrial action at Impala Platinum, the world's second-largest platinum producer, which is losing 3,000 ounces of output a day as most workers are not reporting for duty at its Rustenburg mine.
The mine, shut for six weeks earlier this year because of a power struggle between unions, has been hit by fresh clashes between the dominant National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU). The platinum price, which rose by as much as 24 percent on the year because of the strike that spanned February and March, traded down 0.34 percent on the day at $1,456.24 an ounce.
Holdings of platinum in exchange-traded products are also down since hitting a record 1.398 million ounces in March, to a near four-month low at 1.322 million ounces. Yet platinum remains the best-performing precious metal of 2012, with a gain of 4.5 percent, compared with a rise of 1.1 percent in gold and a loss of 6.3 percent in palladium. Palladium was down 0.3 percent on the day at $609.25 an ounce, and silver down 0.7 percent at $28.22 an ounce.