Gold Falls For First Day in Three as Investors Seek Out Cash

By Feiwen Rong

Oct. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Gold fell for the first day in three, as investors sought cash amid financial turmoil and on concerns about central bank sales of the precious metal and outflows from bullion-backed exchange-traded funds.

Investments in the SPDR Gold Trust, the biggest exchange- traded fund backed by bullion, reached a record 770.6 metric tons on Oct. 10. It fell 3 tons yesterday. The latest weekly release from the European Central Bank showed 7.6 tons of gold was sold during the week ended Oct. 10, Barclays Capital said in a daily note.

``Gold's fared relatively better than other assets in the financial crisis, but with price swings and central banks sales, some investors may prefer cash now,'' Wallace Ng, precious metals trader in Asia at Fortis Bank, said today by phone from Hong Kong.

Bullion for immediate delivery fell as much as $5.43, or 0.6 percent, to $841.47 an ounce before trading at $842.65 at 10:38 a.m. in Singapore. Silver for immediate delivery fell 1.5 percent to $10.1362 an ounce.

U.S. equities yesterday slumped the most since the crash of 1987, hammered by the biggest drop in retail sales in three years and growing doubt that plans to bail out banks will keep the economic slump from deepening.

Crude oil in New York fell to a 13-month low at $73.06 a barrel because of skepticism a rescue of the world's banks will be enough to avoid a recession and stem a decline in global fuel demand. Copper slumped 5.2 percent today to $4,663 a ton in London while soybeans reached the lowest in 13 months.

December-delivery gold gained 0.7 percent to $844.70 an ounce in after-hours electronic trading on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Gold for August delivery fell 2.3 percent to 2,696 yen a gram ($840 an ounce) on the Tokyo Commodity Exchange at 10:20 a.m. local time.

To contact the reporter on this story: Feiwen Rong in Singapore at frong2@bloomberg.net