Actually, a futures market position is most of the time hedging.
Take for ex a silver dealer, (a big one is the so called bullion bank JP Morgan.
They sell silver. If the price rises, they receive more, make more profit. If the price drops, they receive less, make less profit.
Now imagine such dealer sells 5000 ounces to a customer, when the price is $30.
Some months later, the price became $35; and the customer wants to sell the silver to get a $5 profit per ounce.
But the dealer would then buy silver back near a peak price, so a high downwards price risk.
A dealer can't just refuse, his customer would ofcourse not like that.
So, the dealer hedges the silver against dropping prices.
How does he do this? He takes a short position. That means that in case the price does drop, collapse from the peak, he will receive dollars on the margin account of his short positions. Those dollars then compensate for the loss when he again sells the bought back silver from the customer to again to customers.
Take now the other price direction. The silver price rises. The dealer makes more profit with silver sales. But, the margin account of his hedging short position undoes a part of his profits.
So, those commercial hedgers 'adjust' their total net short position according to the price outlook.
When the price sits near a bottom, they have the lowest net short position, simply because the downside price moving room is small.
When the price sits near a top, they have the highest net short position, because the downside price moving room is high.
So, they throttle their amount short positions.
Now, above was what a silver dealer / supply sider / commercial hedger does.
Every short position requires a long position, you can't have a contract with one side, every seller needs a buyer.
So, on the demand side of the futures market, there are people betting on higher prices and lower prices, but mostly, they bet on higher prices, which is the reason that the silver futures market demand side is always net long, and consequentially, the supply side is net short. Imagine such a demand side speculator wants to grab the profit, by dumping the position where his margin account accumulated dollars from during a price uptrend. If the long position is dumped, the demand sides / commercial hedgers / bullion bank JP Morgan has to auto close (aka 'cover') the corresponding short position. It's impossible for JP Morgan to keep the short position, because the counterparty on the long side doesnt exist anymore.
So all that hyped talk about JP Morgan covering shorts, being in trouble, commercial failure, is just trying to make people think the price will breakout, in order to make them pay higher prices (after which the hype-makers then dump for profit. All it is, is closing the short contract sides when the speculators on the demand side decide to grab the by the price uptrend realized profit on their margin accounts. If they didnt grab it, and the silver price dropped, they would start to give again away the profits they accumulated in the uptrend.
Likely the same that blame JP Morgan and hype about 'shorting zilver', are the very same long siders that grab the profit, with as incentive to shift the 'blame', focus to others.
Of course, a system bank like JP Morgan is a crap institution, one of the core nodes that the govts has in its monetary system of theft. But that doesnt mean that what they do on the silver market is different than any of these markets. Usually they have the best insight in the supply, bullion banks like JP Morgan often finance mining projects and other silver market nodes, and that insight give them a better trading position than the X average joes that hunt the free bucks, causing the latter to lose.
