Silver-The Next Big PM Play?

I hope everyone had a great Holiday / day off. Time to start looking at the market again.

If you've been around a while you know silver and SLV are my least favorite assets to analyze because they are so heavily manipulated; whether JPM, the grass-roots "Break JPM's Silver Short" movement, the COMEX hiking margins 5 or 6 times in nearly as many days or the open admission from the CFTC commissioner that there have been "repeated attempts" to control, manipulate and influence the price of silver according to data he's seen.

Word is that something is up in silver again so I took a quick look, I concur. This may be a bit more tricky than the usual trade; I'd like to get some more information via underlying trade, I may even support an actual physical silver play rather than a equity trade, that's why I need to see more information in the coming days, but this tells me something is definitely going on and others (like Eric Sprott) have documented other strange behavior in silver recently.

 Looking at the daily chart most of you can probably spot the activity that is generally connected with a pre-planned cycle or what would be better known as manipulation. Just follow price, ask yourself where the stops would be, where the shorts would step in the market and see if you can spot the proof they did (I gave a couple of hints). Where there's smoke, there's fire.

Taking a broad view of the situation, the 60 min 3C chart of SLV shows some curious things, in September there was definitive distribution sending prices lower, then October accumulation which was the support level on the daily chart above this one. When price turned down in November from the highs, notice that distribution was much smaller this time and at a new price low we have a large 3C relative positive divergence. Something definitely changed from September to October and certainly now.

We'll be looking at this closer, but all the things we look for to gain an edge are there, it's just a matter of timing and finding the right vehicle to take advantage of the situation.