House said:
Chinese financial markets are closed Monday through to Wednesday so the "cartel" might have a bit of fun during then
Last tuesday (04/06/2013) the Comex position situation was this:
Supply side:
Producer/Merchant/Processor/User Long 20759 Short 46587 Net: -25828
SwapDealer Long 35966 Short 18537 Net: 17429
Demand side:
LargeTraders Long 24938 Short 23004 Net: 1934
OtherReportables Long 10113 Short 6691 Net: 3422
SmallTraders Long 19615 Short 16572 Net: 3043
-25828+17429 gives a net total position of -8399
That's about a year production of ASE's by the US Mint.
So yes, they can have a bit of fun. A bit. They lack the positions for more fun, haha.
Nevertheless, my revisit of that march/april 2011 situation (see earlier post here), caused me to think.
Due to a source that confused total ETF holdings of silver with IShares Silver Trust holdings, I confused a part with a total that included that part.
This caused me to erroneously think that IShares caused the silver price $32>$50 runup in 2011.
Since this turned out to be false, the question who bought and sold there, remains unanswered.
Much like this latest (mid april) silver price drop. The Comex position didn't drop, the ETF stocks didn't drop, at dealers no signs of massive purchasebacks of silver from customers (instead temp shortages of the most popular coins). And that newly mined silver gets thrown on the market in one time, knowing that the demand isn't big enough to buy it, would mean some miners/recyclers overproduced and instead of using producer (de)hedging to evade losses by all in one time sales, it was just dumped all in one go.
I just thought of a new explanation for both unexplained price trends. Dark pool markets (see wikipedia), where institutionals like pension funds / 'charity' organisations / and other heavily state-sponsored/privileged entities buy and sell outside the public/private markets, and have not any reporting duty.
Golds price drop was mainly caused by IShares Gold Trust shareholders dumping. Is it known how many different entities dumped there? Because the Comex COT report gives clues by linking amounts traders to amount positions (hence 'Cartel' appears in the talk about it). So that dump>price drop happened was initiated in public markets.
In this scenario, institutionals bought and sold silver in a disguised fashion. And this is also plausible, since golds market 'enjoys' some governmental legal benefits, and silvers not. Dark pool trading may have been the way to manipulate / drain off the silver market, without raising eyebrowns.
And there is another element that indicates dark pool activity around mid april. It's part of a complex story involving the Belgian system bank Fortis, that defaulted and was split up in a 'good' and a 'bad' part. The 'good' part was bought by the French BNP Paribas. The bad part was given an english name: 'Royal Park Investments' and was bought by the Belgian government through one of its institutionals. End april, the US fund Lone Star and the big Swiss system bank Credit Suisse Group AG bought Royal Park Investment from the Belgian governmental institution behind Royal Park Investments.
The funny thing is that last year, Royal Park Investments sued (New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan) 11 large system banks around the world, JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Deutsche Bank AG (DBK), Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS),
Credit Suisse Group AG (CSGN), Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc (RBS), Bank of America Corp. (BAC) and its Merrill Lynch unit, Morgan Stanley (MS), Barclays Plc (BARC), Citigroup Inc. (C) and UBS AG, for their roles in the Belgian Fortis bank losses.
Look at the bold one. Credit Suisse. The same one that bought Royal Park Investments end april this year.
Also remarkable, nowhere is said which part of the price of Royal Park Investments was paid by Credit Suisse / by Lone Star.
And exactly there, 1 week ahead of the purchase, the link with dark pools appears.
Credit Suisse, the operator of the nation's largest dark pool, has told the major industry data providers that it will no longer provide information on how much trading happens in its pool, CrossFinder.
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/04...e-dark-side-of-trading/?ref=creditsuissegroup
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-...han-3-billion-in-investment-bank-lawsuit.html
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_Star_Funds
This all shows that Dark pool trading activity shouldn't be ignored, and may have been responsible for weird/sudden/unexplaineable price movements here and there, alike those 2 silver market ones.
Edit: This article gives a good insight in how trading happens and is performed as a marketwide operation which includes dark pools as a common business. Common for them, not for us.
http://www.advancedtrading.com/algorithms/credit-suisse-introduces-block-algos-to/223900065
And it also says that Credit Suisse (AES) is the industry leader in algorithmic trading and operator of the largest U.S. dark pool.