Gold (and crude oil) biding time as traders weigh markets' risk potential

Gold appears to be biding its time between its recent swing high and prior swing low. Interestingly oil seems to be doing the same. Below are charts of gold, daily and weekly (sorry I wasn't able to post the $WTIC chart with this post right away). It's simple enough to see that gold needs to push higher again to reestablish its uptrend. It made a low where it needed to, looking like a simple ABC zigzag pullback. I'm sure plenty of traders will pile on if it proceeds higher. But traders seem to be pausing to assess the risk appetite and pulse of the markets.

The Fed via Bernanke came out today reassuring a commitment to low rates, helping offset their discount rate hike to 0.75% for emergency lending - and Treasury bonds weakened off after that (raising effective rates at the long end of the yield curve). That apparently helped equities and may help gold and oil too. Not because of the low rates but because of the quantitative easing implied by the Fed's statements. But is there really enough risk appetite to drive gold and oil higher just yet? While I'm happy to buy the dips in both, I'm not yet convinced that the time for selling rallies is over.

The stochastics on gold's daily chart rolled down. Neither the MACD nor the DMI-ADX on gold's daily chart are showing an uptrend either. We're bullish gold in the long term, but just want to get higher confidence that it's shaken off the cycles that have been allowing for the pullback to bottom during this time frame. That goes for crude oil too.