Sorry its taken me a bit to respond. I've met some of the metal traders of these big banks. they are purely motivated by profit up or down. Thats the trading floor... its a profit hub, not a manipulation hub (tho, the way they move the market around is quite the bully tactic, but perfectly legal) As I've stated earlier, the 'manipulation' comes in via POLICY not active engagement in the market. Yes, The fed wants to keep the game going as long as possible... but they are economists, and they are fully aware that if you suppress the price of something, it disappears... We'll silver is still flowing freely so I don't think they are doing a very good job at manipulating the price down. look, what has happened every time there has been price controls.... every single time... without fail... the thing that is being controlled disappears. now, unless you can tell me why silver defies the laws of economics, supply and demand - I posit that its not being actively manipulated through price manipulation. They can play in the short term end of the market through policy, but thats about it.
I think that there is room for a *little* conspiracy I think that most traders and trading rooms are motivated by profit, pure and simple. 'Greed is Good' is a mantra with two edges. The markets are the views of vast shoals of fish, each fish responding to its perception of the environment and using a fairly limited set of responses. If you've sat in the water in the middle of some big shoals the view is breathtaking, and the patterns complex, and it is easy (but incorrect) to view the shoals as individual entities. Most of the pretty show, however, is driven by predation. This shoal is of coral eaters, but this shoal will happily eat them, and then a bunch of apex predators turn up, and everything goes into high gear... The problem is that humans cheat. When the energy traders of Enron found that they could game the system by messing with a few key circuits; guess what? They started bankrupting California. When oil traders found that they could manipulate the market signals of the US national reserve, guess what? I would posit that when a bank finds itself in a position that it can get paid to do something that it would already do (like, I dunno, get free money to pay for suppression of a market into which it can buy physical on the down-low), it's pretty much a given that it will. That situation may have arisen completely naturally, but traders look to get out of the box, join the dots and game the system. There are a lot of smart cookies that have been trading along, and if I had to sum up the trading mindset versus the stacking mindset, it would be Honey Badger versus Beaver. A good trader is not wedded to a belief (I'm a stacker - I believe that PMs are undervalued and will rise massively, a good trader will make money whichever way PMs go - up, down or sideways). Nope - I look at the smackdowns, the trading before opening, the illogical market behaviour and I see someone making money outside the box, and so, yes, there is at least two conspiritors, even if the collusion is unwritten, unacknowleged, and coordinated only by market reaction... and I keep buying the damn stuff anyway.
I think the whole manipulation thing is drastiaclly overstated by silver bugs & conspirsensationalist self interested comentators. Surely if market manipulation was a key profit strategy for paper traders then silver would be $1000 oz. In truth its a PM commodity & the value is driven by supply & demand. The other factor which determines the value in the market is the production cost. In silvers case its primarily a co-product of base metal production therefore the cost is quite low when compared to targeted mining metals such as gold. I'd love Silver to rocket as much as anyone here but I don't see it happening in the forseeable future.
The manipulation goes deeper than just traders making profits on the way up/down. Gold (and therefore silver) is a barometer of the health and confidence in currencies. It's in the governments interests to make their currencies look strong by keeping gold (and therefore silver) down. They must keep gold (and therefore silver) down in an equally aggressive manner to their aggressive currency dilution. That's my take on it.
Was this a conspiracy theory ? If the Bankster cartels are able to do this and not one person is sent to prison for it do you really think that metals are not manipulated for profit and other reasons ? It really is naive to think there is no manipulation going on when the reality of it is staring you in the face. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libor
By 2020 the bull market might have been and gone - lets just keep that in perspective - this is not going to go on forever.
So you reckon that by 2020 current USD/AUD will have the same buying power as today? Forget about silver, think about just general buying power, like food, petrol and stuff... Just by my observation dollar buying power dropped about two times since 2005 (same 7 years interval). To me $100 in 2020 is quite conservative. They've managed to drag GFC for 5 years now. 7 more years? - I don't know. To Mr. Swan - no GFC is not over yet. I guess they'll come up with a new name for GFC part II.
IMO i think the bull run was in 2011 & what were seeing now is around the bottom considering the cost of extraction with fuel costs wages etc rising im not sure it can go back to earlier prices .I feel safe in my position at these prices & am not to worried about doing my dough in the long term .Fuel ,wages & equipment are not getting any cheaper. Gold is the one im more worried about . What if the price of gold has been let go because the US had a feeling the mass accumulation would begin by other countries & when the time comes they push it down so the big buyers like china etc effectively lose a mountain on it .....just sayin.
Look at the silver mining stats. Less silver is being pulled out of the ground year after year. Combined with rising costs/inflation as mentioned as well as industrial use, surely silver can go low 3 figures at least and in the process lower the GSR...
still, one reason some people stack instead of purchasing shares of an exchange traded fund is out of mistrust that paper silver is backed by physical. that's the fundamental manipulation theory here, it is inescapable. suggesting that there is not much manipulation is essentially considering that paper is backed by physical metal even if a third of the u.s. output of the shiny metal gets traded in a day, likely in a huge sell-off all at once.
True Silvstack & I've heard it said that paper silver exceeds the physical by a factor of hundreds to one. I'm not denying there's some market manipulation. Its a relatively small market open to exploitation, you just have to look how volatile the silver market is to prove that. Just feel that the whole manipulation conspiracy deal is overstated to about the same margin as the paper/physical disparity exists IMHO. Silvers a good investment, I just don't believe we will see the sky high prices some speak of in the near future.
getting back to the original thread topic... i made an impulse purchase yesterday when visiting an online friend's business (brisbane based gold dealer) and had lunch with them... I wasn't planning on making a purchase (and as such not including it in my official trading challenge...) but they had some pretty good prices for PAMP gold and silver so I bought a bit.... my name is John and I have a metal addiction.
If a million dollars of physical silver is sold in the real world, does anyone in the paper market hear?
I am... you seriously dont think an alternative will be on by then? Or laws being passed enforcing paticipation in a global currency?
So back to the topic. silver fall kind of slowing. RSI very low. maybe bounce a little then down to sub $26..Is that the possible scenario you thinking of John? I suspect that lower price will have a slightly higher RSI at the same time.
If i was a billionaire I swear I'd single handedly up the price of silver to triple digits in no time flat. Pity I earn $18 an hour :lol:
