The CME Delivery Report showed that 113 gold and 28 silver contracts were posted for delivery on Tuesday. It was all JPMorgan and the Bank of Nova Scotia in gold...and JPMorgan and Prudential in silver. JPMorgan was the only issuer in both metals. Here's the link to the 'action'.
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The GLD ETF took another hit yesterday, with 185,429 ounces of gold being withdrawn. And, for the third day in a row, there were no changes reported in SLV.
The U.S. Mint reported a big jump in gold eagle sales yesterday...19,500 ounces worth. There were no sales in silver eagles. For the month, there have been 63,000 ounces of gold eagles and 3,407,000 silver eagles sold.
Over at the Comex-approved depositories on Thursday, they reported a net withdrawal of 250,241 ounces of silver. The link to that activity is here.
Friday's Commitment of Traders report was just about everything that one could have hoped for. In silver, the bullion banks reduced their net short positions by 3,001 contracts, bringing the Commercial net short position down to 46,750 contracts, which is 233.8 million ounces. The '4 or less' bullion banks are short 201.8 million ounces...and the '8 or less' bullion banks are short 266.5 million ounces.
What's amazing about these numbers is that since we know [from last week's Bank Participation Report] that JPM's short position is around 100 million ounces, it's easy to see that the three traders left in the '4 or less' category, must be holding around 134 million ounces between the three of them. I would say that HSBC is one of the three...and that the other two big shorts would be U.S.-based bank holding companies. Because their 'bank holding companies'...they are not required to report their short positions to the CFTC in the monthly BPR.
But it's what's in the '8 or less' category that's real interesting. By straight subtraction, the four bullion banks left in the '8 or less' category must hold about 65 million ounces...16 million ounces apiece. A pittance compared to Morgan and the rest of the 'big 4'. I would guess that the four smaller bullion banks in the '8 or less' trader category would mostly be American-based bank holding companies as well.
Now, to gold...where the bullion banks covered a huge pile of short positions...29,518 contracts [2.95 million ounces worth] to be exact. The Commercial net short position has now dropped down to 22.5 million ounces. The '4 or less' bullion banks are short 18.9 million ounces...and the '8 or less' bullion banks are short 25.5 million ounces.
What applies to silver regarding bank holding companies, also applies equally to gold.
Since Friday's COT report was for positions held at the end of trading on Tuesday, January 11th...there has been, without doubt, more improvement in the bullion banks' short positions since then. But, because of the criminal way they cover what they're doing, we won't have a clue as to how much improvement there was until next Friday's report. So, once again, we wait.
Here's Ted Butler's "Days to Cover Short Positions" graph that's courtesy of Nick Laird over at sharelynx.com. The '4 or less' bullion banks are now down to 104 days...and the '8 or less' bullion banks are down to 137 days of world silver production to cover their short positions. These are big improvements from what they were about a year ago.
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