As someone who's been watching, trading and holding physical gold for decades, I've never seen this type of market where every downtick gets bought day after day, week after week. And in the face of mostly neutral or flat-out unfavorable futures positioning. The continued move up in the past couple days has surprised even me. That said, I think this is economic/monetary instead of geopolitical or event-driven. It's also an allocation story: a quick glance at 13F data for GLD shows it's radically under-owned by institutions. The main message from all this couldn't be more clear: protection will be crucial.