Monday, May 2, 2011

On that Silver thing

Here's an article that was emailed to me on the ambush in silver, many of the issues he raises were touched on today. There's another article following this one. Trading the PMs is dificult enough, or at least anlyzing them. I think I'm going to diversify the silver ETFs and start looking more at PSLV and SIVR.


Dave from Denver from his Golden Truth commentary wrote this commentary on the apparent manipulation on the part of the bankers:

 MAY 2, 2011

Pure Criminality

I hope precious metals newbies have not been emotionally derailed by last night's obvious ambush of silver by the corrupt Wall Street bullion bank cartel.  It's funny because just yesterday I was chatting with my significant other, who happens to be from Las Vegas, about organized crime.  She mentioned that Vegas is full of organized crime gangs, not just the casino mafia.  I replied that any area that generates tons of cash flow is mired with organized crime and extreme corruption:   Vegas, DC and Wall Street most prominently (obviously there are others but those are the biggest).  Little did I know that several hours later the action in electronic silver trading would ironically highlight my point about Wall Street!

Make no mistake about it, what occurred last night right at the open of electronic futures trading in gold and silver was nothing more than a very aggressive attempt by the big Wall Street banks who are irrationally short paper silver to shake out weak hands in order to reduce the fraudulent short positions in paper silver.  Anyone who thinks last night's action - as reported in the mainstream media - was connected to a feared slowdown in China or the Bin Laden thing or the Bolivian mining news is either hopelessly naive or pathetically ignorant of the facts.

So let's look at some facts.  First, no other commodities were hammered.  If China slowdown fears were the culprit, shouldn't all of the base metals used in industrial production have been hit hard along with silver?  Seriously.  Even more telling was the fact that the dollar barely moved in either direction last night - and it's below 73 right now.  The media loves to explain movements in gold/silver with inverse movements in the dollar.  How come the dollar was not doing a moonshot in response to the gold/silver cliff-dive?

Second, the CME has been raising silver margins regularly now.  We are not seeing this in other commodity contracts.  In fact, the margin on Comex silver was raised over the weekend from a little over $12k to a little over $14k.  That's over 30%.  The margins on gold were not raised.  The CME always seems to raise silver margins when silver is moving sharply higher and when all of the evidence points to physical silver shortages.  That latter point was apparent to me when I saw the very low number of delivery notices handed out.  Typically a large percentage of the open contracts are given notice and delivered within the first few days of a delivery period.  Not this time.  What this tells me is that banks with large counterparty delivery positions (i.e the ones with big short positions, like JPM and HSBC) are going to make an aggressive attempt to induce weaker hands to puke their positions before JPM and HSBC are actually required by contract law to make delivery.  Let's see how this plays out over the next 3 weeks.  Last notice day is May 27th and you can monitor delivery activity on the CME website.

Third, some big off-Comex futures brokers raised their in-house margin requirements for silver to double or more than double the required margin at the Comex.  The most prominent firm, and one of the world's largest commodity brokers, is MF Global.  MF Global jacked its margins on Friday to a little over $25k.  MF Global happens to be run by ex-Goldman CEO Jon Corzine.  Hmmm, anyone think there is any connection between Corzine and the big firms who control the Comex?  How about between Corzine and the CFTC chairman who is also an ex-Goldmanite?   Another very large futures broker, thinkorswim - which happens to be owned by Ameritrade - raised its margin on silver to over $30k.  Anyone besides me understand that Ameritrade caters to small, individual speculators who were likely forced to sell to cover this margin hike?

Needless to say, last night's ambush was comically initiated right at the open of electronic trading, which commences in the early evening on Sunday, when the futures markets tend to be at their least liquid.  There was an absolute flood of sell orders at the open but the cliff-dive chart was accompanied by a relatively small amount of total volumn.  This suggests that there were some motivated "sellers" trying to push the market lower and force selling by the MF Global or Ameritrade customers who would be unable to meet the new margin requirements.  To be sure, there was also plenty of unloading by longs who were frightened by the volatility and wanted to protect any profits they might have.

Anyone who thinks this was anything but a criminal event staged by the corrupt Wall Street crime "families" needs to better educate themselves on the facts of the precious metals market.  Please notice how the dollar is now plummeting, gold is now UP over $7 from Friday's close and silver is down a mere 80 cents.  Kudos to all of those who understand the dynamic and held on tight to their position.  It is a tried and true law of economics and markets that market interference/intervention always fails and ultimately backfires on the parties attempting to manipulate.  In this case Wall Street crime families and the Fed.

Quite frankly I think it's tragic that there are well-respected analysts like Ted Butler out there spreading the gospel that the CFTC and SEC will ultimately crack down on this or that bullion ETF's like SLV and GLD are legit.  In his latest newsletter he defended SLV's credibility and made the claim that SLV holds all of the bullion that it is supposed to hold.  He clearly has not read the prospectus or he would understand that there are legal loopholes a mile wide in both the GLD and SLV prospectuses that make it possible for both ETF's to play the fractional/leasing games with their metal. To assume that a criminal enterprise like JPM would not take advantage of this is a tragic flaw in Butler's body of work.  It is absurd to overlook the obvious connection between the JPM Comex short position and the fact that JPM is the "custodian" of the largest known stockpile of Comex-deliverable silver bars on the planet.  I know based on my 25 years of experience in this industry that the people who work on Wall Street and rise to the top get there by lying, cheating and stealing to whatever extent they can.  The amount of money JPM is losing on its silver short is "blood" money.  Expect this aspect of the game to become even more intense.  But then again Butler lost all credibility with me in this part of his otherwise brilliant Comex/COT statistical/analytic work when he repeatedly and unyieldingly defended his view that the CFTC would eventually crack down on the corruption and fraud at that Comex.  I got news for you Ted:  the perps would be ice-skating in hell before that ever happens...

Quick editorial update:  I just learned that China and Vietnam, the largest and fifth largest gold buyers in the world were closed last night for their May Day holidays.  Adds even more weight to the argument that last night was a strategic ambush.

Here's the next story...

Is The SLV Wired To Blow?

In GovernmentLeveraged ETFMary SchapiroOpen ThreadSECSilverstocks finance on Friday, April 29, 2011 at8:13 pm
I’m not real big on suspense, so I’ll tell you upfront, I think so.  Once again, we may be about to find out what happens when regulators are asleep at the switch.
As of this writing there are 364 million shares of SLV outstanding.  In the past five trading days (April 25 – 29) more than 755 million shares have been traded, and get this, more than 10 million ounces of silver were taken from the trust between the 26th and the 28th, taking available shares with them.  From Stockhouse.com :
Note: Stockhouse.com is the only free website that I know of that accurately tracks the number of ETF shares outstanding and changes (wish I could say the same of my broker).  Enter the ETF ticker with the suffix “.SO”
At what point does trading volume relative to existing shares become unbelievable?
Information on institutional holdings of ETF shares is also hard to find. but according tonasdaq.com, 86 million shares of SLV are held by institutions, but that does not include any holdings reported since April 1, 2011.  And speaking of missing data, does anybody know where China Investment Corp’s 13F‘s  are?  The sovereign wealth giant filed its initial holdings with the SEC on February 5, 2010,   but no additional data has been released.  The SEC requires the form to be filed within 45 days of the quarter’s end. 
The point is that the SLV has become one of the most heavily traded instruments on our exchanges and there is an all too finite number of shares.  There’s at least some evidence that the SECs institutional holdings data is outdated and/or incomplete.   What happens when all the shares are spoken for?  If it hasn’t happened already (I suspect it has), it should soon…..
Then what?
Will the SEC suspend sales of the SLV?  Will the SLV start trading at huge premiums to NAV?  Will the SEC even notice?
I don’t know about you, but I’m going with “SEC will never notice,”  because they have no mechanism in place to ensure “shares owned” doesn’t exceed shares outstanding (remember Mary Schapiro’s only qualification to Chair the SEC is her inability to recognize a Ponzi).
Obviously if SLV starts trading at huge premiums, it isn’t tracking the price of silver anymore.  It will have a market dynamic unto itself.  Suspending sales until more silver is deposited with the trust  will immediately cause a run on physical silver the likes of which has never been seen before.  The silver exchange on the COMEX will blow up in a matter of minutes, followed shortly thereafter by JP Morgan and the class structure of western civilization.  If you don’t know how tight the silver supply is getting, take a peak at this chart from 24HOURGOLD:
Kudos to 24hourgold.com for doing a better job tracking the rapidly vanishing supply of registered silver than the COMEX!!!!  (Hope it’s OK I stole a screenshot).
To make matters even worse, SLV trades options.  Lots and lots and lots of options.  So when the shares outstanding are all sold, there will be people with call options, who have bought the right to buy shares of SLV at a given price.  Forcing cash settlement means the SLV no longer can claim to track the price of physical silver, because the purchase of silver by an authorized participant to create the shares to cover the options would have surely moved the price of the metal.
So once again America, ignoring the grim reality of the situation is the only logical course of action.  The SEC knows all too well that that’s what porn sites are for.  So unless somebody posts this on Pornhub……
I’m sure that Tyler Durden’s instincts will be proven correct again, when he stated thatBlackrock’s Kevin Feldman’s defense of the SLV was a red flag in and of itself.  Blackrock is the sponsor of the SLV, and Kevin urged everyone to read the prospectus.  That was probably not such a good idea.  Be extra careful when you try to download the prospectus, I got the following warning:
Comedy ensued after using Firefox (safe mode) to view the prospectus:
“The sponsor does not exercise day-to-day oversight over the trustee or the custodian” 
Which seems to conflict with Kevin’s letter:
“At BlackRock, we take the responsibility of protecting shareholder interests very seriously and spend a lot of time constructing our iShares products to help ensure they meet investor expectations.”
So in reality Blackrock takes protecting shareholders about as seriously as the US Department of Justice takes perjury.  To his credit, Kevin did link to a list of bars the SLV holds in some vaults over in England.  The list was prepared by JP Morgan, because if you can’t trust them regarding silver, who can you trust?  Rather than spoil all the potential ways the SLV might not meet “investor expectations”, I thought it would be fun to make a contest of it (see comments).
The SLV pimps out the price action of the silver it holds to shareholders.  It can terminate the trust for a long list of reasons, not the least insignificant of which is if  the Authorized Participants (who actually own the silver) feel like it.
Suddenly everybody has an opinion of what the price of silver should be, but as JPM is now finding out, if you don’t have silver to sell your opinion doesn’t count.
I don’t wish any ill on SLV shareholders, but make no mistake, you don’t own silver.  History has not been kind to people who made similar mistakes,  and recent history should tell you no one is looking out for you. 
 Miscellaneous Fun Facts:
  • In February, 2007 the author contacted the SEC via email regarding Countrywide Financial CEO Angelo Mozilo’s insider trading.
  • In March 2007 the author applied for an SEC bounty regarding Angelo Mozilo’s insider trading (up to 10% of recovered amount) .  Countrywide’s stock was trading at about $37 at the time.  It would trade over $40 in May and implode to less than $5 by late 2007.
  • On June 4, 2009 (27 months later) the SEC charged Mozilo with insider trading and securities fraud.
  • In October 2010 Mozilo agreed to pay $67.5 million in fines to the SEC to settle the charges against him.A
  • At its peak, Countrywide had a Market Cap of more than $26B.  Angelo Mozilo has an estimated net worth of $600 million.
  • The SLV currently has a Market Cap of approximately $17B.
  • The author never received a bounty from the SEC, because the Dodd-Frank “Financial Reform” legislation repealed the previous SEC bounty program.  Bounties can no longer be paid based on an outsider’s analysis of publicly available information.
  • In 2010, the author applied for a job as an “abusive trading practices specialist” with the SEC.  He received no reply.
  • In February 2011, the US dropped its criminal investigation against Mozilo.
  • Paybacks are a bitch.
Common sense (and a little math) tells me that the SLV is already a fraud.  When that becomes obvious to all is anyone’s guess, but based on my past experience, neither the SEC nor the CFTC will recognize it until about two years after it implodes.
Update:  Thanks a million to Steve Quayle!!!  He is the only major blogger who has linked to this story thusfar (kind of makes you wonder how much some of these other guys value truth).  This story needs to be discussed.  If you’ve got a blog, take this story and run with it!

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