SLV ETF Adds Massive 523 Tonnes Of Silver In Current Week

There were some very odd occurrences in the world's largest silver ETF, the iShares SLV. After the exponential increase of the price of silver in the spot market, almost hitting $30/share on November 9, the SLV ETF, which like GLD purports to holding the underlying precious metal, saw a massive basket creation demand, amounting to a whopping 523 tonnes of actual silver added to the fund's holdings (equivalent to 16.8 million ounces, at a cost of about $456 million) for the week ending November 12, currently at a record 10,718 tonnes. While we don't purport to knowing how much free silver is available in the open market, the possibility that any one entity could have manged to purchase such a massive amount of actual silver, of which 352 tonnes was supposedly acquired on November 10, without completely destabilizing the actual supply and demand mechanics, and creating a vicious loop where basket creation leads to a further surge in prices, is just slightly mind boggling. As we have speculated earlier, we expect comparable activity in the GLD ETF to follow suit. Additionally, we will shortly look at this week's CFTC COT data to determine just how massively JPM's silver short has impacted the firm's P&L.

P.S. for those who may be wondering, the custodian, i.e., entity in charge of vaulting the "silver", is good ole RICO-lawsuit embroiled HSBC. (full SLV prospectus link)