Is it time to be short on gold

We need to understand what the commercial traders are thinking in the marketplace, because they are the users and producers of the commodity, and as such are the main players. They do not use the market to speculate, but instead use it to sell forward/hedge their production or demand. The noncommercial trader includes individual investors, hedge funds, and some large financial institutions.

As per the World Gold Council, gold primarily comes to the market from mining, on average accounting for two-thirds of total supply each year (the remaining third comes from gold recycling). When bringing this gold to the market, mining companies have two options, namely:

Sell newly mined gold at the current price
Sell gold which has not yet been mined (i.e. still in the ground)
If prices are falling, gold miners may choose to hedge (sell their future production at the fixed price) their production in order to protect themselves against price fluctuations. The main disadvantage there is that if gold prices go up they would lose opportunity, which means that their profit potential is limited.

As of March 21, 2017, commercial traders are holding Short Positions of 230,279 contracts versus 101,282 commercial long contracts, which tells us that the sentiment is bearish and they expect that prices may fall. Generally, people short when they think the market is going to fall but a stock with high short interest ratio may show a bullish trend in near future, as there will be upward pressure on the stock arising from short sellers covering their positions. I believe that in terms of commercial traders' short positions indicate a bearish signal.

This briefly means that commercial traders aimed at protecting the actual production, believe that the price of the metal will decline. This is a very negative signal for the gold price.

On the other hand believe the Fed to raise interest rates five times by the end of 2018, which in turn is expected to support the dollar, and since gold is denominated in dollars are expected purely correlative price drop. The US economy will continue to grow at these levels of inflation and the dollar will be supported in the future. The other negative fundamentals for gold prices is that imports of gold in India, which is the largest consumer of gold has dropped by half from 2011 onwards.

Here's how it looks graph of gold and how it is possible to market positioning

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