Just say that 3 times, click your heels, and it will be true! A trader who admitted Thursday to conspiring to manipulate futures contracts in precious metals committed those actions while working at Deutsche Bank AG, according to a person familiar with the matter. The trader, David Liew, pleaded guilty in federal court in Chicago to a fraud conspiracy over the spoofing of futures contracts for gold, silver, platinum and palladium futures, according to court papers. Along with spoofing -- which is placing orders without the intent of executing them in an attempt to manipulate the price -- he acknowledged front-running customers’ orders. [MORE...] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...-guilty-in-metals-probe-tied-to-deutsche-bank Of course, this is barely scratching the surface. A sacrificial lamb, if you will...
Is that the new thing these days? Finally admit what anybody with a half a brain cell knew all along (conspiracy & manipulation) -- yet claim that it's simply been holding the price up? Yes, that's one option. As is holding it down. As is spiking it up. As is spiking it down. As is keeping it flat. These are all the results of conspiracy & manipulation. Now read that sentence again. Anyway, since you volunteered a specific number, care to show your math? Or are you just talking out your arse in attempt to ruffle some feathers?
I used to believe the price of gold and silver was being held down by manipulation, but I also used to read and believe the pro PM pumper pundit writers like gospel. Remember silver to $100, dollar to crash IMMINENTLY, silver supply is going to run out, GOTS by Jim Sinclair, hedge fund manager says this is a game changer, etc, etc. It's easy to sell subscriptions and get followers, just "preach to the choir". Tell them there is no manipulation and you are a troll, etc. If the price of silver and gold is being manipulated, it would have to be a world-wide mass hypnosis that magically makes nobody give a $hit about silver and gold. Perhaps that is happening. PS If enough people wanted to buy the crap the price would go up. Plain and simple. http://www.kitco.com/news/2017-06-01/Silver-Gold-Coin-Sales-Down-More-Than-50-For-The-Year.html
Since you are know it all, tell us what would happen if silver became $30 an ounce, $50 an ounce, $100 an ounce, $10,000 an ounce? If the price of silver climbed to $10,000 an ounce over the decade will silver make rich people poor, will it stop etf trading, will we have Armageddon, will the homeless be living in mansions, will some sinister deep state go bankrupt, or just like bitcoin being worth $3000 go unnoticed by 99.9% of the population? Silver is just a metal, if people stopped investing in silver what do you think will happen to the price, since it's literally just in the ground waiting to be dug out like copper?
The DB trader convicted and his associates were moving the price one way or another by a very small amount to enhance the profitability of a specific trade. In the big picture, these are totally insignificant little miscreants doing something that is very widespread in the world, and in no way specific to precious metals. These are NOT the people who manage significant price swings, like the recent $2.50 drop that was almost perfectly linear for more than a couple of weeks. Kindly look at the CFTC dis-aggregated long report for silver. The latest is here: http://www.cftc.gov/dea/futures/other_lf.htm If the intent is anything other than manipulation, why would 4 traders typically own 30% of the entire short side of the COMEX silver market, and 8 traders as much as 50%??? (The numbers are a bit lower now after the recent price smash.) This translates to short positions of 150 days of global silver production owned by only 4 traders and nearly 200 days for the largest 8. Those numbers are by far the highest of any commodity traded on the COMEX, and three times the corresponding numbers for gold. Further, I suggest that most of that 150 days is owned by just two traders, JPM and Scotia Bank. If any other commodity market was comparably dominated by only a few traders, the regulators and media would be all over it. In March, JPM took delivery of some 2200 silver contracts for itself and another 600 for clients, which totals nearly TWICE the COMEX limit of 1500 silver contracts being taken by any one dealer in a month, and we don't hear peep about it. Why??? Why has it been possible to trade PM for the last 5 years based pretty much entirely on looking at COMEX-COT positioning of the largest 4 short positions as reflected in the weekly COT reports and make very good money doing it? I assure you that PM prices are being manipulated, and the WHO and the HOW are obvious, at least as far as the COMEX part of it is concerned. There is undoubtedly comparable action in the LBE, but unfortunately, no public reporting of what goes on.
If that is really what you think, why do you bother trolling here? Do you get paid for it?? I can't imagine anybody with nothing better to do.
It somewhat funny and ironic, considering that the incentive for the creation of what is named "futures market" was to "frontrun" customers - speculators. So this story is alike an employee of a company division that uses equipment of the company to try the same that his boss does on company level.
I am sure every market has some "manipulation" going on at any given time. I can see how certain "manipulation" might cause some very short term effects depending on how and when it is done, but could not keep an asset down for year after year after year. What's stopping the average Joe from going and buying as much silver, physical, that he can afford right now? Nothing. Premiums are lower than they have been in a very long time. So there is plenty of supply at retail and wholesale levels right now. One problem for physical pm's that is not manipulation is nowadays there are too many alternatives to "siphon" cash out of the futures and PM stocks, which is where $$$ had to go in the "old days" if you wanted to invest in PM's (besides physical). Now there are some many "derivative" plays I could see where maybe that in a sense adds fake "supply" to the equation. By that I mean, and I can't verify this, but I would bet not all of the PM ETFs have their shares backed 100% with allocated (or even unallocated) metals. Since they don't, buying into some of those vehicles is like buying imaginary PMs (no real metals are necessary), so the real physical supply of the metal never gets brought into the picture.
Silver Doctors usually but these days I double cross SD because Julian Assange Wants $500 an ounce silver price Because the Russians have a few million tons to dig out
I'm with Ipv6..... Gatito needs to do more homework before cut'n'pasting sections of random permabull newsletters to support his beliefs. If you read the CFTC findings, you will note that all this "manipulation" and "conspiracy" occurred during the biggest bull-run silver has ever seen - supporting the view that manipulation was in fact holding/pushing price up : "The Order specifically finds that from at least December 2009 through February 2012, Liew, on numerous occasions, acting individually and in coordination with other traders on the precious metals trading desk of Financial Institution 1, placed orders to buy or sell gold or silver futures contracts that he did not intend to execute at the time the orders were placed (spoof orders)......." http://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/pr7567-17
I have not seen anything suggesting that Liew was part of any broad conspiracy to move prices significantly in any specific direction. Instead, it simply appears to be a simple case of trying to spoof the price a bit lower when buying and higher when selling, to enhance profits on a particular trade. This practice occurs on all electronic order matching platforms. Remember the guy living in his parent's basement in London? He wrote a computer program to do his spoofing. And watching the orders appear and disappear on the Thai futures exchange in the pre-open is absolutely comical.
To make money, serious money, with or without manipulation higher moving price is the only way to make real big money. How many shorters have been known to make 100s of billion maybe trillions, because the real players are not interested in few billions.
The last 5 years have seen 100,000 to 150,000 contracts move back and forth between Commercials and Managed Money many, many times. When prices are rising, the largest 4 - 8 commercials are shorting, when the price peaks, they sell longs and start to cover shorts, they are covering on the way down, buying some longs near the bottom. They make money both ways. And when prices are near peak, JPM stops buying physical, and starts again after smashing the price. Lots of people made billions shorting the housing bubble, Paulson made several. I can't think of anybody who has made $100s of Billions or $Trillions at anything other than taxing us. The richest men in the world are "only worth" $30 - $50 Billion?? How much do you really need, or want??? For the same %age move in the right direction of the underlying asset, shorters generally make more than the longs due to the contango built into futures pricing. Obviously, however, prices can not move 100% or more in the short direction.
Those "4-8 commercials", act in behalf of clients. "Managed Money", is just an "inbetween" class, hence their name. One cannot trade without a counterparty. One, cannot buy without a seller. One, cannot sell without a buyer. So any large net position change on the supply side, IMPLIES an equal but inverted position change on the demand side. The funny part is, that some talk all the time about shorts and covering shorts and commercials (being the supply side of the market), and not a word about that equally sided demand side (Large Traders - that include the nonreported, and Small Traders). The remaining question then is who takes the INITIATIVE to take a futures position? I'd say the demand side. The side that the silver dealer clubs never talk about. For a simple reason: it's not a baker dictating people from the neighbourhood to buy bread from him. It's the customers that have to decide so and the baker can only try to convince them. Covering a short on the supply side, thus has a very simple trigger / reason: a long that just quit a long position. And that "quit" can just be an opposing order. For ex if Joe had 1 futures long position and decides to end his exposure to the price, he can ADD a second futures position, being 1 short position. His total net position then becomes zero, his exposure to the price also zero, and despite him holding now 2 futures positions, for the rest of the market it's like he left the market. Telling parts of stories, being selective, also in picking time frames, typical tricks to mislead.
+1 You are wasting your time Pirocco. I have tried to explain this to him at length before... but he insists on using his own interpretation of "trader" - it suits his argument.
http://www.cftc.gov/MarketReports/CommitmentsofTraders/ExplanatoryNotes/index.htm "Trader Classification Staff use Form 40 data5 and, where appropriate, conversations with a trader and other data available to the Commission regarding a trader’s market activities to make a judgment on each trader’s appropriate classification. Some multi-service or multi-functional organizations have centralized their futures trading. In such cases, their Form 40 may show more than one of the new categories. Division of Market Oversight staff place each reportable trader in the most appropriate category based on their predominant activity. In most cases, the choice of category is clear, but in some cases judgment must be exercised by Commission staff as to what is a trader’s predominant activity.6 Some parent organizations set up separately reportable trading entities to handle their different businesses or locations. In such cases, each of these entities files a separate Form 40 and is analyzed separately for determining that entity’s proper Disaggregated COT classification. A trader’s classifications may change over a period of time for a number of reasons. A trader may change the different ways it uses the markets, may trade additional or fewer commodities, and may find that its client base evolves. These changes may lead to changes in classifications and categories and/or changes in the commodities to which a trader’s various classifications apply. Moreover, a trader’s classification may change because the Commission has received additional information about the trader." Producer/Merchant/Processor/User A “producer/merchant/processor/user” is an entity that predominantly engages in the production, processing, packing or handling of a physical commodity and uses the futures markets to manage or hedge risks associated with those activities. Swap Dealer A “swap dealer” is an entity that deals primarily in swaps for a commodity and uses the futures markets to manage or hedge the risk associated with those swaps transactions. The swap dealer’s counterparties may be speculative traders, like hedge funds, or traditional commercial clients that are managing risk arising from their dealings in the physical commodity. Money Manager A “money manager,” for the purpose of this report, is a registered commodity trading advisor (CTA); a registered commodity pool operator (CPO); or an unregistered fund identified by CFTC.7 These traders are engaged in managing and conducting organized futures trading on behalf of clients. Other Reportables Every other reportable trader that is not placed into one of the other three categories is placed into the “other reportables” category. Numbers of Traders The sum of the numbers of traders in each separate category typically exceeds the total number of reportable traders. This results from the fact that, in the “swap dealers,” “managed money,” and “other reportables” categories, “spreading” can be a partial activity, so the same trader can fall into either the outright “long” or “short” trader count, as well as into the “spreading” count. Additionally, a reportable “producer/merchant/processor/user” may be in both the long and the short position columns. In order to preserve the confidentiality of traders, for any given commodity where a specific category has fewer than four active traders, the size of the relevant positions will be provided but the trader count will be suppressed (specifically, a “·” will appear for trader counts of fewer than four traders).
