Is the Plunge Protection Team Actively Manipulating the Gold Price?

This is what I wrote as part of Friday's  EPJ Daily Alert:

GOLD MANIPULATION?

As I have said before, I am not one to call out gold manipulation withv every down move in gold. However, gold trading was temporarily halted on the CME for 10 seconds this morning at 8:42 AM ET for a "stop logic event," according to Bloomberg.

A big trade knocked $25 off the price of gold in a short, two-minute span.The trade was a 2 million ounces of gold trade hitting the market, and it was one trade, a sell order. The sell order triggered a stop loss orders, pushing the price even lower. Whoever is doing this selling is doing very sloppy selling and appears to want to trigger the stop loss orders. It looks very suspicious to me[...]

Although I continue to believe we are in a mild downtrend in gold, traders should go long after this price drop for a quick upside trade. Long term accumulators, continue to accumulate. Gold manipulations, whatever their origins are very short-term in nature.

Following the October 1 drop in gold, I wrote in the EPJ Daily Alert :

I am generally not one to shout out market manipulation every time there is a big move in a market, but the current down move in gold looks mighty suspicious to me. As I write gold  is down $40.00  an ounce.  That's 3.01%. We know from comments by Pippa Malmgren, a former Plunge Protection Team member, that the PPT watches gold and knows where its weak price points are. That is a big statement from an insider. It is not hard to jump from that statement to the idea that the PPT enters the market at key times.

Consider the current situation, overnight trading in gold saw some mild safe-haven buying interest due to the U.S. government shutdownt. This is the type of  action you would expect from the gold market, especially given that  overnight the US dollar hit a 1-1/2 year low against the safe-haven Swiss franc and a near 8-month low against a basket of widely-traded currencies, DXY.

It is thus very odd that gold did not move in tandem against the dollar. The selling in gold and silver (Silver is down 4.5%) didn't start until gold started trading in the US. The selling pressure in gold triggered sell stops  in quick fashion.  This is the way manipulators play the game: Start the selling just above stops and let the sell stops take over from there.

It's possible it was just locals taking out the stops, but given the timing relative to the government "shutdown," it smells an awful lot to me like PPT action attempting to suffocate any signal of panic in the markets over the gvt shutdown, by suffocating any gold climb.

Here's the UBS veteran trader Art Cashin commenting Friday on the recent activity in gold and reaching pretty much the same conclusion I have. He tells King World:

Well, it (gold) is under some pressure.  And while I am far from being a conspiracy theorist, I could see where some of the people involved in that asset class would be concerned because we’ve had several incidences of very large sales.

And they all seem to come at approximately the same time in the relatively early morning in New York, usually before the stock market has opened.  The question there is, why would you suddenly dump a large amount of gold?  Why wouldn’t you try to piecemeal it out over the (course of the) day?

So, if that happens once it could be an accident of technology, or it could be a simple error.  But when it happens 5 times over a period of months, it does raise questions.  Is it being done purposefully?  Is somebody trying to send a message?  Is somebody trying to influence the market?

We don’t have enough details, but as I say, as a guy who doesn’t ordinarily believe in conspiracy theories, I think there should be some further investigation as to who is selling, and why always at that time?