A lot of leveraged players got liquidated today. The big banks, except Deutche Bank, have spent the last month making insane price predictions for gold and silver. Sucking in lots of new money.
Then on a Friday, at the close of the month, on options expiration day, on a day that LME delays their opening, CME has ‘technical’ issues that prevent circuit breakers from triggering, and the FED appt provides some cover, they tank the price. This was a totally coordinated effort and nobody will convince me it hasn’t been planned for weeks.
HSBC was likely the beneficiary they bailed out of 6 billion dollars of short positions. And they crushed the hopes and dreams of millions of new retail metal buyers who will never touch the stuff again. Which is what they want. They can’t have retail competition with the MIC for metal.
And, despite the spread between Shanghai and NY reaching a mind blowing $76 at one point, the banksters let it be known that they can do whatever they want. The physical market won’t stop them. The regulators won’t stop them. Retail buying won’t stop them.
Silver needed to close above $88 to stay inside the upsloping channel. They allowed it to get back to that briefly, and then in the last hour pushed it below, almost as if to say FU. We control the price.
And I don’t think it’s over. I hope I’m wrong. I do think the miners will eventually recover and I loaded up late this afternoon on gold and copper miners that were just too stupid cheap to pass up.
I lost 8% NAV today, between gold, silver and miners. But I know people who lost 50% and a couple who basically got liquidated. All because of leverage. So stupid.
Still, we are up 12% for the year even after the bloodbath. And if the sell off continues Monday I will close out all of my mining positions but two, book the profits, pay the tax, and say thank you very much.
Have a great weekend. We are looking at 6 inches of snow and windchill below zero. In coastal South Carolina. Crazy.
P.S. That IS some crazy S Carolina weather that sounds more like a harsh winter in the NW. We are a lot more temperate than the NE or the midwest, but we do still run cold in the winter, just not as bad as the those other places. This has been a relatively mild winter for us, except for all the flooding. No snow at all so far, and not that many freezes. I guess it all blew down your way.
My feelings when I saw the action in silver were that something along the lines of market rigging that you describe must be happening. This crash in silver was too massive of a move in my opinion to just be relief that the Fed wasn't going to be blown up by the Don (a concern the many who care about the Fed, which doesn't quite include me, except that I think the Don's intentions would be a worsening of the worst money-printing aspects of the Fed, rather than an improvement).
My feeling as I watched silver soar in the months ahead of this crash also ran along the lines of rigging--that it was too meteoric to be explained by people becoming concerned about the crashing dollar. It COULD be just from that because there is plenty of reason for that to be concern, except that I don't know that many people see that imminent danger. The huge interference by China in cutting off silver supply to the world said to me we have a national whale in the market, and I THINK we can see who that is. Then I wondered, "Will they do what whales do? Will they crash the market they have been buying up so they can get prices down to do more buying?"
The problem is I don't have the kind of evidence I need to figure out what's going on, especially since following precious metals hasn't been my thing all these years. I'm more focused on macro-economics. We'll have to see if I can turn up anything of value this weekend, though I'm not real hopeful. But it smells of a whale or a pod of whales, crashing the value of all the silver they own, just so they can rush into the selling frenzy and hose up more without driving the price higher for themselves than it already was and, thus, bite off a little bigger piece of the corner on the market. The next question is, do they want all that silver for the investment value, or do they want it in order to lock in all the materials they need for future production of things like robots and AI data centers where they want to be the global leader? I'm inclined to think the latter, but maybe it is BOTH.
A lot of leveraged players got liquidated today. The big banks, except Deutche Bank, have spent the last month making insane price predictions for gold and silver. Sucking in lots of new money.
Then on a Friday, at the close of the month, on options expiration day, on a day that LME delays their opening, CME has ‘technical’ issues that prevent circuit breakers from triggering, and the FED appt provides some cover, they tank the price. This was a totally coordinated effort and nobody will convince me it hasn’t been planned for weeks.
HSBC was likely the beneficiary they bailed out of 6 billion dollars of short positions. And they crushed the hopes and dreams of millions of new retail metal buyers who will never touch the stuff again. Which is what they want. They can’t have retail competition with the MIC for metal.
And, despite the spread between Shanghai and NY reaching a mind blowing $76 at one point, the banksters let it be known that they can do whatever they want. The physical market won’t stop them. The regulators won’t stop them. Retail buying won’t stop them.
Silver needed to close above $88 to stay inside the upsloping channel. They allowed it to get back to that briefly, and then in the last hour pushed it below, almost as if to say FU. We control the price.
And I don’t think it’s over. I hope I’m wrong. I do think the miners will eventually recover and I loaded up late this afternoon on gold and copper miners that were just too stupid cheap to pass up.
I lost 8% NAV today, between gold, silver and miners. But I know people who lost 50% and a couple who basically got liquidated. All because of leverage. So stupid.
Still, we are up 12% for the year even after the bloodbath. And if the sell off continues Monday I will close out all of my mining positions but two, book the profits, pay the tax, and say thank you very much.
Have a great weekend. We are looking at 6 inches of snow and windchill below zero. In coastal South Carolina. Crazy.
P.S. That IS some crazy S Carolina weather that sounds more like a harsh winter in the NW. We are a lot more temperate than the NE or the midwest, but we do still run cold in the winter, just not as bad as the those other places. This has been a relatively mild winter for us, except for all the flooding. No snow at all so far, and not that many freezes. I guess it all blew down your way.
My feelings when I saw the action in silver were that something along the lines of market rigging that you describe must be happening. This crash in silver was too massive of a move in my opinion to just be relief that the Fed wasn't going to be blown up by the Don (a concern the many who care about the Fed, which doesn't quite include me, except that I think the Don's intentions would be a worsening of the worst money-printing aspects of the Fed, rather than an improvement).
My feeling as I watched silver soar in the months ahead of this crash also ran along the lines of rigging--that it was too meteoric to be explained by people becoming concerned about the crashing dollar. It COULD be just from that because there is plenty of reason for that to be concern, except that I don't know that many people see that imminent danger. The huge interference by China in cutting off silver supply to the world said to me we have a national whale in the market, and I THINK we can see who that is. Then I wondered, "Will they do what whales do? Will they crash the market they have been buying up so they can get prices down to do more buying?"
The problem is I don't have the kind of evidence I need to figure out what's going on, especially since following precious metals hasn't been my thing all these years. I'm more focused on macro-economics. We'll have to see if I can turn up anything of value this weekend, though I'm not real hopeful. But it smells of a whale or a pod of whales, crashing the value of all the silver they own, just so they can rush into the selling frenzy and hose up more without driving the price higher for themselves than it already was and, thus, bite off a little bigger piece of the corner on the market. The next question is, do they want all that silver for the investment value, or do they want it in order to lock in all the materials they need for future production of things like robots and AI data centers where they want to be the global leader? I'm inclined to think the latter, but maybe it is BOTH.