Gold trades myopically based on fear and greed, generally not taking the larger picture in to consideration (long term: weakening dollar, US economy slowing, inflation growing). As such, opportunities arise to exploit fear and greed to yield a high profit.
As you can see in the image below, gold oversold based on fear this morning that the market would collapse based on credit concerns. I bought here $675.00 because I felt gold, being down about $20 from the day before, was oversold.
As you can see, it quickly rallied to $686.00, where I sold, because I felt the rally was overdone by traders relieved by the Federal Reserve injecting $19B in liquidity to banks suffering from a lack thereof.
That’s basically how the fear/greed trade works. This is a single trade that can span minutes, hours, days, weeks, even months and years depending on your strategy and outlook.