The last trading week for the year saw the price of gold end $24 (1.3%) higher, while the price of silver rose by 26 cents (1.1%) for the week. (As a reminder, I always use the late day close on the leading COMEX futures months, which is Feb in gold and March in silver). As a result of gold’s slight relative outperformance, the silver/gold price ratio widened out by a fraction of a point to 75.7 to 1. I should also point out that yesterday’s late close was the highest weekly finish for gold in 6 months and the highest weekly close for silver in 8 months; with gold up by $200 and silver up by $6 from their respective lows a few months ago. In terms of the silver/gold price ratio, yesterday’s close featured a 20-point relative strengthening in silver on the rally over the past few months. While…

In our increasingly complex world, it’s easy to get caught up in the details of just about any topic. That’s why it’s important to step back every now and then and look at things in the most basic manner possible. For sure, this applies in spades to me and my special interest in all things silver. I’ve been studying silver for so long that it’s second-nature for me to dig so deep into its inner workings – to the point where what’s important becomes too technical. So, let me step back a bit today and speak in very basic terms. First, silver is a rare commodity that traces its roots, along with gold, to the start of recorded civilization some 5000 years ago. Long prized and valued for its beauty and allure as money, decorative objects and jewelry accounted for it being accumulated in such forms for thousands of years…

In a trading week featuring both fairly sharp ups and downs, prices managed to close higher; with gold ending up by $3 (0.2%) and with silver finishing higher by 52 cents (2.2%). As a result of silver’s relative outperformance, the silver/gold price ratio tightened in by a point and a half to 75.5 to 1; by a hair, the strongest silver has been relative to gold in about nine months – back to when the absolute price of each was at the highs for the year. In a world that appears to make less sense daily in many ways, it’s nice to see something that does make sense, namely, silver showing signs that it might be starting to throw off the shackles of the COMEX price manipulation it has been bound by for decades. There were a good number of developments this week, some of which I’ll touch on, away…

We’re close enough to the end of 2022 to review the year for any lessons learned in gold and silver. Speaking in round numbers, we’re essentially unchanged price-wise from where we began the year. Of course, there was price volatility and at the high in March, gold prices were up almost $250 from year end, only to fall nearly $450 from that peak to the lows of Sep to Nov, before recovering to where we started the year. In silver, there was a rally of $4 to the highs ($27.50) of early March and a fall of $10 from that peak to the lows ($17.50) of Sep to Nov, before a $6 rally brought us back to unchanged for the year. So, while we ended the year, to this point, essentially unchanged, the $450 trading range in gold and the $10 trading range in silver appear to be the widest…

After surging to fresh six-month price highs in gold and eight-month highs in silver earlier in the week, what looked like typical middle-of-the-night COMEX commercial price-rigging to me caused gold and silver prices to end the week marginally lower; with gold ending $6 (0.3%) lower and silver finishing 25 cents (1.1%) lower for the week. As a result of silver’s relative underperformance, the silver/gold price ratio widened out by a half point to 77.1 to 1, a rather mild give-back of silver’s recent relative gains. In the face of the rather egregious mid-week deliberate price smackdown, by week’s end I was left more with the impression that the commercial price-riggers weren’t in their usual price control mode that has shaped gold and silver prices for decades. This, combined with the already palpable sense that the rather impressive gold and silver price rally since early November still seems highly underappreciated, continues…

My head is still reeling from contemplating the results in Friday’s Bank Participation Report, for positions held in COMEX gold and silver futures as of Dec 6. As I tried to describe on Saturday, there was a startling lack of new short selling by the banks (both US and non-US) since Nov 1, despite a quite-notable increase in total commercial selling and concentrated selling over the 5 reporting weeks covered, particularly in gold. I’ll dig deeper into this recent strange phenomenon in a moment, but it’s only the latest in a string of pattern changes over the past couple of years (and longer) that have caught my attention. As I’ve stated continuously, I’m always on the lookout for changes in the pattern of things related to the decades-long COMEX price manipulation. My reason is simple – because the manipulation has evolved around a strong and rigid pattern of the collusive…