Gold little changed above $810, oil supports

Gold was little changed and held onto the previous day's strong gains on Thursday, supported by higher oil prices and a fall in the dollar versus the euro.

-- Spot gold was trading at $814.50/815.50 an ounce as of 0047 GMT, compared with $814.20/815.00 in New York on Wednesday.

-- Bargain-hunting helped gold to run up to $815.60 on Wednesday. But the precious metal is in a correction mode after hitting a 28-year high of $845.40 last week. It touched a low of $790.80 on Tuesday, the lowest since Nov. 2.

-- The gold market was largely unaffected by the news of a powerful magnitude 7.7 quake that hit mineral-rich northern Chile on Wednesday.

-- Bullion used to back StreetTRACKS Gold Shares , the world's biggest gold exchange-traded fund which represents more than 80 percent of the total value of all such funds, dropped to 588.74 tonnes as of Tuesday, compared with 599.50 tonnes on Monday. -- Global gold demand in the third quarter rose 19 percent year-on-year to 947.2 tonnes on the back of robust inflows into bullion investment funds and improved jewellery consumption, industry-sponsored World Gold Council (WGC) said.

[ID:nN13591725] -- Spot platinum traded at $1,439/1,444 an ounce, almost flat from $1,440/1,444 in late New York on Wednesday.

-- Earlier this week, a correction in gold pulled platinum down to a one-month low of $1,385.

-- Ten thousand unionised contract workers at South African mines, including at Anglo Platinum and Impala Platinum , ended their strike on Wednesday after resolving a pay dispute. [ID:nL14885615] -- Oil jumped more than 3 percent on Wednesday on expectations of falling U.S. inventories as OPEC brushed off calls to raise supplies.

-- U.S. crude futures inched down to $93.97 a barrel on Thursday ahead of U.S. weekly inventory data due later in the day.

-- Gold tends to travel the same path as oil as some investors buy the metal as a hedge against oil-driven inflation.

-- The euro was steady from late U.S. trading on Wednesday at $1.4645 , hovering in sight of a record high of $1.4753 hit on EBS last week.

-- Against the yen, the dollar was steady at 111.27 yen , but down from Wednesday's intraday high of 111.76 yen on electronic trading platform EBS.

-- The key gold futures contract for October 2008 delivery <0#JAU:> on the Tokyo Commodity Exchange was up 36 yen a gram, or 1.2 percent, at 2,948 yen.

-- The benchmark October platinum futures <0#JPL:> rose 31 yen a gram, or 0.6 percent, to 5,051 yen.

-- The most-active December gold contract on the COMEX division of the New York Mercantile Exchange gained $1.7 an ounce to $816.4 on electronic trade after rising 2 percent in New York.

-- Silver was at $15.04/15.09 an ounce versus $15.02/15.07 in New York.

-- Palladium was little changed at $370/374 an ounce, versus $369/374.

Precious metals prices at 0100 GMT Metal Last Change Pct chg YTD pct chg Turnover Spot Gold 815.10 3.60 +0.44 28.22 Spot Silver 15.04 0.10 +0.67 17.04 Spot Platinum 1440.00 0.00 +0.00 27.21 Spot Palladium 370.00 1.00 +0.27 11.45 TOCOM Gold 2948.00 36.00 +1.24 20.57 27293 TOCOM Platinum 5048.00 28.00 +0.56 18.66 14325 TOCOM Silver 542.60 6.40 +1.19 9.99 422 TOCOM Palladium 1350.00 7.00 +0.52 7.57 187 Euro/Dollar 1.4646 Dollar/Yen 111.38 (Reporting by Risa Maeda; Editing by Michael Urquhart)

-- (Reuters) -- 15FC4.xml

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