Important update on the Precious Metals Industry in North America.

As I have been saying since last year, the retail activity has been contracting. This is evident in much lower bids by wholesalers, online retail bullion dealers as well as, local dealers. In addition, the sell backs from investors is putting pressure on newly minted products.
There is no better representation of this than Amark’s recent quarterly report. Amark is one of, if not the largest company, transacting in precious metals. They are a publicly traded company as well.

The following charts are the quarter end and 9 month ending period for their fiscal 2025 year. ir.amark.com/news-events/pr… Look at the contraction in gold and silver ounces sold. Look at the reduction in precious metal secured loan values as retail has been closing out these loans due to higher prices. In the recent quarter as prices moved higher in precious metals, the average order size is now declining.

1/8 Sprott Physical Silver Trust (PSLV) Alert - follow up

I appreciate everyone's comments and criticisms of my previous post about PSLV and SLVR and will address the comments here.

Some have commented that the recent surge in PSLV short sales volume was due to investor hedging.

I have provided a chart of the PSLV short sale volume going back to Oct 2023. During the same time frame, I included a chart of the borrowing fee and shares available to borrow of PSLV.

Look at October 2023 to February 2024 when the borrowing fee was near 11-12% and compare it to February 2025 when the fee peaked around 4%.
Look at October 2024 when silver peaked before the election.

In both these instances (2023-2024), short sales volume was very negligible compared to the short sales volume since January 2025. 2/8 Were investors not hedging in the past but all of a sudden decided to start hedging post tariff announcements while silver has begun to test its recent high of last year?

I acknowledge the volume between SLVR and PSLV are much different. The trading volume for PSLV has risen dramatically along with Short sale volume.
Certainly investor interest has picked up in this sector. The rise in short sale volume can be market makers shorting shares to meet demand or PSLV being used as an underlying instrument for indexing, collaterilzation, or ETF flows.

1/10 Sprott Physical Silver Trust (PSLV) Alert

There has been questionable activity this year regarding the trading activity of PSLV. Many are under the impression that PSLV is a direct alternative for physical silver. This could not be further from the truth. PSLV is a closed end fund that has numerous risk elements which are not present in direct ownership of actual physical silver. In essence, PSLV is a security or derivative of actual silver. 2/10 This year has seen an unusual degree of short sale volume since January see chart below. There is a plausible explanation for this, however, this event has brought on additional material risks to this security. In fact, many are completely unaware of what I am about to explain. Please note this is not investment advice.

1/9 The biggest buyers of physical gold and silver right now are the Banks who are involved in the precious metals derivatives and trading markets!

Are growing risks of default or failures imminent? 2/9 Below is a report from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. They compile a quarterly report on Banks involved in Derivative Trading. Amazingly, four large US banks held 88.1 percent of the total banking industry notional amount of derivatives. These derivative notional amounts increased in the third quarter of 2024 by $10.7 trillion, or 5.2 percent, to $218.8 trillion.

Has #Silver historic price rise of 2008-2011 already started in 2024?
The technical pattern I am looking at is an inverted head and shoulders pattern. The inverse head and shoulders is a technical chart pattern that signals a potential trend reversal from a downtrend to uptrend I want to start with the 2008-2009 Silver chart. During the financial crisis, silver made a significant low that went on to create a tremendous return (5x) over the next 3 years. I have circled multiple inverted head and shoulder patterns.

1/#Gold is at a pivotal juncture. Check out similar chart formations in the past and how they compare to today's gold price. Will also show how the longer term picture played out after comparing the shorter time frames.

Each chart represents the near term futures contract. 2/ Following is the 2007-2009 #gold chart. I marked a downtrend line at the end of the chart.

Has Silver's historic price rise of 2008-2011 already started in 2023?
The technical pattern I am looking at is an inverted head and shoulders pattern. The inverse head and shoulders is a technical chart pattern that signals a potential trend reversal from a downtrend to uptrend I want to start with the 2008-2009 Silver chart. During the financial crisis, silver made a significant low that went on to create a tremendous return (5x) over the next 3 years. I have circled multiple inverted head and shoulder patterns.

1/Why are #gold and #silver inventory levels at the #Comex continually declining?
Is it due to overwhelming physical demand? If so, why are premiums on physical products collapsing?
Likewise, if demand is falling, why are prices rising?

Let’s dig in….. 2/Gold and silver demand has been strong throughout 2022. Futures action on global exchanges has seen large buyers in early 2023. This has forced prices higher. With prices higher, we have seen a noticeable slowdown for physical products.

1/Something structural is happening to the Futures markets in Precious Metals. Both the Comex and Nymex are seeing a collapse in open interest. My premise has been, the introduction of Basel 3, leverage (unallocated) is being moved to exchanges and away from bank’s balance sheet 2/Now we are seeing continued collapse of open interest in the futures market at the same time Wall Street has ramped up their structured products over the last 2 years.

More perplexing developments with SLV.

Silver was up 9% yesterday and the SLV NAV per share only rose 2% from $17.52 to $17.88
SLV. More interesting is the massive share premium over NAV (Net Asset Value per share).

NAV on 9-30-2022 was .12% discount and jumped to a 6.8% premium on 10-3-2022

Surpassing the premium on 1-28-2021, 5.57% that kicked off the silver squeeze.

Something very strange happened in SLV yesterday. Silver was up 2.96% yesterday. However, SLV’s NAV went down from $17.21 on 9/27/22 to $16.82 on 9/28/22. The fund went from trading at a discount to NAV of -1.79% to a premium of 3.77% during the same time. 556 basis point swing. There are 14 Authorized participants (some of the largest giants in the financial industry), yet they cannot keep the NAV from swinging wildly between 4% to 6% on a daily basis?

Recent update on the Bank Call Report shows continued growth in precious metal derivatives for Bank of America. Now reaching $34 Billion in notional value. 2 years ago is was $800 million. here is their latest structured note, called, Market-Linked One Look Notes Linked to the iShares® Silver Trust.
The product has 1 to 1 downside participation and the big win (22%) comes if the market is flat or slightly up.
Guess which direction and maturity favors the house.

The Silver ETF #SLV is getting more perplexing.

On Friday 8.8 million shares outstanding were created, the fund went to a premium to NAV of 2.79%. This means the market value of each share were worth more than the fund's assets per share (silver plus any cash). What was really odd was that on September 16 there were 477,738,959.20 Ounces in the trust. On that day 8.8 million shares were created. Supposedly silver is delivered in lieu of shares being created, However, the net ounces in the fund dropped as of Sept. 18, 2022 Bar list

1/Seen a lot of discussion with lease rates rising in gold. What is happening and why backwardation has abated are interconnected. This may be a little tricky to follow and confuses many to believing the argument of price suppression when in fact market forces are to blame. 2/Lease rates rise when there is a demand to borrow the metal. The recent backwardation was an interesting occurrence. On one hand there was physical demand in the marketplace by investors, the other saw large funds using this period to borrow metal and sell (short) it.

1/ Where and How I see a reversal of trend in precious metals. There has been much talk of paper liquidation in ETFs and Futures. A number of research firms are looking for a capitulation to the inflation theme that brought many into precious metals in 2020. 2/ No question we have seen large amount of pressure in the PM sector the last few weeks. However, one point that no research firm has been able to explain is the consistent backwardation that has set in on all 4 precious metals.

Massive jump in Notional principal amount of over-the-counter derivative contracts for Precious metals (Silver, Platinum, Palladium only) for JP Morgan.... $278.8 Billion increase over 1 quarter. This is breath taking.

Appreciate @cruthergien for pointing this out Dec 31, 2021 total amount was $27,037,000,000 (approx. $27 Billion)

Many questions surrounding the Fed's Reverse Repurchase Agreement ( #RRP ). The ability to raise rates and address inflation has little to do with the #FOMC announcement every 6 weeks and more to do with this program. As one can see almost $2 #trillion is in this program. As Paul Harvey would say, here is "the rest of the story" Could the #RRP been designed to stop Treasury-Bill ( T-bill ) rates from going negative or keep upward pressure on yields due to a shortage of available t-bills.

1/ Could the #LME #nickel fiasco happen to the #Comex #gold and #silver market?

On my recent Twitter Spaces with @PalisadesRadio I mentioned that we may have a problem with current and future availability of gold and silver bars from the expanded refiner list.

Please retweet! 2/ Back in 2020, the #CME expanded the list of approved refineries whose bars are eligible for good delivery to the Comex. This was due to overwhelming demand for physical product and to maintain an orderly market. bullionstar.com/blogs/ronan-ma…

1/ The #PhysicalVersusPaper discussion and the effect on silver’s price can be a heated topic. Part of the last “#spaces” event we touched on various #derivative products constructed by BofA and JP Morgan. 2/ Expanding on this topic where #Silver (the actual metal) is used as a ploy to create publicly traded #investments, let’s look at 2 more traded #securities.

1/ Large derivative positions building up in Precious metals. Learn More. This is a follow up to thread below.

https://twitter.com/profitsplusid/status/1509183511567110145

2/ After doing further research, I believe Ted Butler’s assumption in his article that the large Bank of America derivative position is likely a massive precious metals lease and short sale is incorrect.

Have had a lot of questions about a recent article regarding the OCC report – 4th quarter - Quarterly Report on Bank Trading and Derivatives Activities on precious metals. Article is here. silverseek.com/article/anothe… Looking for more information on the big rise in Precious Metal (Silver, Platinum, Palladium) notional derivative values over the past year. Specifically, the big jump came with Bank of America. This category includes Silver, Platinum, and Palladium. See below.