In the early hours of the New York morning on Thursday, when scarcely a few hundred lots of gold futures are usually traded, a wave of buy orders worth over $2.3 billion surged into the market. Prices soared 3 percent in just 10 minutes, setting the tone for the next 12 hours of trade - and puzzling many traders and investors who have been rattled by a series of similarly abrupt, and largely unexplained, trade surges over the past two weeks. While sudden swings in the price of gold are nothing new, the usual causes - a shock in economic data or a "fat finger" erroneous trade - don't seem to fit. While the U.S. ... (full story)