Happy "Australia Day" Crew,
Dr Gloom back with you for some more cold water therapy...
(First of all, I'm sorry for my recent absence. My wooden leg slipped on some spilled coconut oil yesterday and I fell into a lifeboat. It took me a long time to convince the sailors to put me back on board my own ship...)
Well, the February futures contract options expiry for Gold and Silver occurs tonight (Jan 26) in the U.S. - and we all know what that means!
There still seems to be a big set up going on in silver at the moment. We had a modest takedown effort on Tuesday night, then a fairly flat Wednesday, and early this morning we saw one dollar rise in silver on the (hardly surprising!) news of perpetually low interest rates from yesterday's FOMC meeting.
Now, that sudden rise last night is a red flag to a silver bull because silver is ALWAYS HAMMERED when truly bullish FED news like that is being released. I can only conclude that we are still in the middle of a managed rise, with a particularly nasty take-down effort waiting in the wings. With 20,000 silver contracts still to be covered, JPM are probably allowing this rise to draw in some fresh meat, I mean - technical longs, for their speculative short-covering program.
(Another 'warning sign' is the fact that silver has been 'leading' the way up in recent days, rather than following gold's moves. That's a sudden break with the traditional "Rules of Silver Manipulation".)
Of course, against this short term caution, we do have the good news that gold has now broken very decisively above its shrinking channel of moving averages one more green tick on the charts!
This is very bullish for the medium term for both metals. The next resistance levels for silver are around $34-35, so it's possible JPM might allow silver to rise up to that region, before giving themselves a 'free ride' down on the 'resistance bounce' - perhaps with a margin increase or two thrown in for good measure! (You might have not really noticed the $32 resistance level we blew through it like it wasn't even there!)
It will be interesting to see how the current week ends.
Nevertheless, we are making good headway now, and JPM are clearly playing a losing hand. The recent silver rises have done very little to dampen ANY of the bullish fundamentals; it would exhaust me to even try to list them all right now.
When the silver price goes vertically upward overnight - as it certainly will one day - I do hope no-one here will say "I wish I'd bought more"
The next little dip might be your last change to get in at this very attractive level...
Source : Casey Research
SPOT : USD $33.50