Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Is there a run on silver at the COMEX?

Ok I hate when this happens, I get lazy for a few days and don’t bother checking the silver warehouse stocks and when I go back for a peak I have one of those WFT! moments as silver levels have dropped from 124 million just a few days ago to 115.6 million ounces. This is big!

Why are stocks dropping, and why so quickly?
Why would someone remove their silver from storage? A margin call and a need to liquidate perhaps, or getting their personal assets away from ground zero for fear of something messy like a default happening at the Comex? Or is it just late deliveries not keeping the stocks up

I don’t know at this point, it might just be a fluctuation in storage levels corrected later in the month by mass deliveries or it could be the start of a run on silver.

I’ve not noticed any bad physical shortages recently, Scotia seems to have maples in silver and gold and there have been less complaints recently about delays at NWT Mint, (at least I’ve heard less). Yet I’m told that for each of the last 5 trading days 2 million ounces of silver have been delivered putting us on track to hit the monthly delivery maximum of 15 million ounces. This looks big folks go make a physical purchase if you can manage it.

Just to note that on Wed the trend did not continue and there as a small change in category transaction and a modest delivery of around 200,000 ounces.