Some Thoughts On Silver Price Manipulation

[LuckyStrike]

I think we can all agree that silver is manipulated through various means. It is a small enough market and the players on the suppression side literally have printing presses at their disposals. So this part is hard to deny.

Something I have considered over the past few days is the price and just how long it can be manipulated.

The only thing which stands in the way of their manipulation as I see it is physical buying where the COMEX literally runs out. According to Eric Sprott when he put in his several hundred million dollar order for PSLV the physical he received was minted after his date of his purchase, so it is my opinion that the COMEX runs our more often than we think it just takes very big buyers.

Just a decade ago when silver was in the low single digits even "poor" people could afford it if they wanted to. I mean 4-5 bucks isn't much money to anyone that I know. So my theory is that the COMEX wanted to raise the price to a point where it isn't easily affordable to a good % of the population, and then entrench there and not let it go higher (in the short to intermediate term). I mean 30-40 per coin is a lot of money to a lot of people, it's a good dinner out or a tank of gas, but 4-5 bucks isn't even fast food money.

I think they knew that it was inevitable that silver would be where the populace flocked to when they caught on to the inflation story, and at 4-5 bucks the COMEX would be run dry, but a 30-40 bucks the physical buying pressure has to be reduced and this to me is what they are trying to accomplish, limit physical buying while not totally enriching current holders (again in the short to intermediate term) I know the US Mint sells more SAE's than ever before, but imagine what it would be today if the price was 4-5 bucks, their presses couldn't even keep up.

So I guess ultimately in this theory it is that TPTB have allowed silver to run to 30-40 and intend to keep it in this range in order to lower physical investment demand while scaring new investors with the volatility. They do this because they have more price control here than at single digit prices because even small investors could overrun the COMEX, but now you have to be a pretty big dog to have an effect on physical.

Just some thoughts I had, what do you guys think.

[Neuro]

I just think that Silver will become more desired the higher the price goes. For many high end investors Silver is still to cheap to be taken seriously. A billion dollars buys a bit less than 30 million ounces of Silver right now, or almost 1000 metric tons, that is 90 cubic meters of storage space if you manage to pack it without air in between. That is too much! $1 Billion of gold is only 20 metric tons, and fits into slightly more than a cubic meter, and you can fit it into a medium sized yacht...

[mamboni]

I think we can all agree that silver is manipulated through various means. It is a small enough market and the players on the suppression side literally have printing presses at their disposals. So this part is hard to deny.

Something I have considered over the past few days is the price and just how long it can be manipulated.

The only thing which stands in the way of their manipulation as I see it is physical buying where the COMEX literally runs out. According to Eric Sprott when he put in his several hundred million dollar order for PSLV the physical he received was minted after his date of his purchase, so it is my opinion that the COMEX runs our more often than we think it just takes very big buyers.

Just a decade ago when silver was in the low single digits even "poor" people could afford it if they wanted to. I mean 4-5 bucks isn't much money to anyone that I know. So my theory is that the COMEX wanted to raise the price to a point where it isn't easily affordable to a good % of the population, and then entrench there and not let it go higher (in the short to intermediate term). I mean 30-40 per coin is a lot of money to a lot of people, it's a good dinner out or a tank of gas, but 4-5 bucks isn't even fast food money.

I think they knew that it was inevitable that silver would be where the populace flocked to when they caught on to the inflation story, and at 4-5 bucks the COMEX would be run dry, but a 30-40 bucks the physical buying pressure has to be reduced and this to me is what they are trying to accomplish, limit physical buying while not totally enriching current holders (again in the short to intermediate term) I know the US Mint sells more SAE's than ever before, but imagine what it would be today if the price was 4-5 bucks, their presses couldn't even keep up.

So I guess ultimately in this theory it is that TPTB have allowed silver to run to 30-40 and intend to keep it in this range in order to lower physical investment demand while scaring new investors with the volatility. They do this because they have more price control here than at single digit prices because even small investors could overrun the COMEX, but now you have to be a pretty big dog to have an effect on physical.

Just some thoughts I had, what do you guys think.


You've summed up the situation perfectly. In essense, they are making a measured tactical retreat by allowing the price of silver to rise sufficient to prevent demand from igniting. Also, they can short silver to suppress price indefinitely as long as naked shorting is allowed by the CFTC and thay can borrow infinite funds at zero percent to stay solvent. Presently, the banks are bloated with trillions in cash at virtual zero financing cost while 95% of the American people are systematically being reduced to pennery and abject poverty. The American people on the whole are too broke to buy silver. Our only hope of fair and honest silver price discovery will come from foreign buying, especially China and India. I believe that will happen in time, probably within 1-2 years as the dollar contines to slide on world markets.

[hoarder]

Even at 30-40 bucks, physical silver is still such a small market that it could easily run out fast, if not for the proliferation of paper silver satisfying the demand from so many investors.

When there is a huge drop in the POS, the technical analysis people always have idiotic explanations for the "correction", but ask them to explain what changes in the fundamental value of silver have occurred that caused the so-called "correction" and they come up blank.

They tell you that fundamentals explain the long term price and TA explains the short term. They can explain away perpetual manipulation with TA because long term means never. How do you put a number on "long term"?

In their endless discussions on GIM2, the TA guys rattle on for thousands of posts without drawing the distinction between paper silver and physical silver.

We all know (and so do the TA guys) that if 1/4 of the paper silver investors converted to phisical, the POS would go ballistic. But that fact becomes obscured by the endless and distracting chatter about TA.

TA does have it's place, but it has to take a back seat to fundamentals and this is what they seem to forget. TA is always overdone in a manner that obscures rather than adds to the fundamentals and the TA crowd, mostly dimwits, have memorized so much pseudo-sophisticated TA jargon that they identify with it and derive self-esteem from it.

IMO, the key in dealing with our fellow PM investors is to redirect the discussions back to fundamentals. Keep demanding they draw a distinction between paper and physical, keep advocating long term physical hold, keep reminding them how difficult it is to manipulate physical and how easy it is to manipulate paper.
It's not that they don't already know all this, but they focus on stupid shit instead.

[gunDriller]

i've been looking at small saw-mills.

i like this one -

http://www.northerntool.com/shop/tools/product_200429916_200429916

$7000 - just have to wait for silver to hit $70 an ounce.


it's true that violent price swings "shake some leaves from the tree" - who is it, Harvey Organ, that uses that term ?

that is, scares off investors that are used to the US stock market, which is propped up via Plunge Protection Team.

then they (noobie PM investors)enter a market where Machiavellian forces are pushing prices in the opposite direction, without knowing about Andrew Maguire & Jim Sinclair & Chris Martenson & all the other interesting people who have knowledge of PM value & PM market manipulation.


in the long run, Chinese buying + Indian buying + European buying (all those rich Europeans trying to dump their Euro's !) will completely overwhelm the physical markets - and paper will de-couple from physical.

meanwhile, central bankers will keep trying to scare people away from PM's, via any number of mechanisms, e.g. taxation of silver purchases like in many European countries.

so i'm wondering, what year will i be able to trade 100 ounces of silver for that saw mill, i.e. silver @ $70 an ounce ?


i think silver was headed that way this year - that's why the Leap Day shenanigans.

[Neuro]

I agree with you on TA hoarder, certainly there is something to psychological barriers in price development, but I think a lot of TA becomes self fulfilling, and sometimes I wonder if TA were developed for the sake of the manipulators? I mean if you as a manipulator of a market knows aproximately what a significant subset of highly active traders is going to do, you could take advantage of that! IMO they let the TA's away with something like 2/3-3/4 of winning trades, the problem is though the 20-30% of the trades you lose, where you end up losing more than you gained in the winning trades. I don't remember seeing any long term successful TA's. Usually it attracts naive young men, with a certain skill for mathematics, and a personality geared towards gambling addiction... I used to be one! But once you realise the man behind the curtain, you drop the short term speculation for quick profit vs a more fundamental long term approach, where you go in and buy when it is cheap even if the TA's scream 'It broke major support-Sell!' and you sell because it is expensive even though the cheerleaders screams 'it's going to da moon, the last resistance was broken', and you stop trading in time limited derivatives, because you realise that short term the price is heavily manipulated...

Anyway keeping the price between 25-50 may be the optimal for the manipulators right now. Too high for average Joe, too low for the überwealthy, only smart money...

[Neuro]

Gun driller.... I doubt silver will have momentum to get above $50 prior to summer, then slow summer, $50 broken in October-November. A couple of months later it will be up to $70, but wait a couple of months more and you'll only need to sell 70 t.oz to get the saw mill! However if you can earn a few oz's a day from it maybe it is worth buying at a higher price, in Silver, but earlier?

[Sparky]

...
When there is a huge drop in the POS, the technical analysis people always have idiotic explanations for the "correction", but ask them to explain what changes in the fundamental value of silver have occurred that caused the so-called "correction" and they come up blank.
...
They tell you that fundamentals explain the long term price and TA explains the short term. They can explain away perpetual manipulation with TA because long term means never. How do you put a number on "long term"?
...
Just trying to understand your criticism of TA, hoarder.

When there is a "correction", there is no change in the fundamental value of silver, so there's no need to come up with a fundamental explanation. There's only a change in price. That's why the move is technical.

Now it seems you're saying that TA tries to mask the fact that manipulation is going on. That's a completely wrong assertion. As a matter of fact, many technical moves are very much related to manipulation, and a good technical analyst should know that.

Most paper investment markets are manipulated, not just silver or gold. One could argue that the silver market is more manipulated because the market is relatively small, and because it's real value is much harder to pin a price on than, say, a corporation. And sharp out-of-the-blue sell-offs aren't unique to silver. Perhaps more exaggerated, but so are the upward spikes. Because silver price is so volatile, sometimes it's better to use TA on gold prices to figure out price moves in silver.

Market movers (manipulators) play off of investor sentiment. [Edit: Just saw Neuro's post on this.] Technical analysis is an attempt to anticipate how market manipulation and investor sentiment (neither of which is a fundamental) will affect price (not value!) in the short to medium term. Fundamentals change price over the long term. What's the long term? Roughly 15-20 years, but it can be longer or shorter depending on the market. The last secular bull market in gold lasted about 9 years, from the closing of the gold window in 1971 to the blowoff top in 1980. That one was unusually short, because it was a market that had an artificial government-imposed lid on it. In contrast, the bond market has been in a secular bull for 30 years, fueled by the fundamental of ever-decreasing interest rates that are now approaching zero.

My point is that technical analysis and manipulation are not mutually exclusive. They go hand-in-hand.

[hoarder]

Neuro summed it up pretty well.

When there is a "correction", there is no change in the fundamental value of silver, so there's no need to come up with a fundamental explanation. There's only a change in price. That's why the move is technical. Consider how false and deceptive the term "correction" is. When look at the definition and you analyze what the term is being used for can see how TA jargon does exactly what I claimed it does.


Now it seems you're saying that TA tries to mask the fact that manipulation is going on. That's a completely wrong assertion. As a matter of fact, many technical moves are very much related to manipulation, and a good technical analyst should know that. There is a big difference between manipulation of markets in general and manipulation of PM's. Markets in general are manipulated so the manipulators can profit from foreknowledge of moves both up and down. PM manipulation has nothing to do with that. PM manipulation is done by the banking elite for the purpose of preventing PM's from becoming considered a viable alternative to FRN's. It is only manipulated DOWN and any up moves are caused by fundamentals.

[gunDriller]

i think occasionally the price is manipulated up.

from one of the Andrew Maguire interviews [London metal trader guy], he describes the silver raids, going into detail on specific raids.

he said that the price was goosed up "to invite the locals on-board" - and then smashed down. he was a member of the clique that had advance notice of the market action, then he became a whistleblower and laid it all out in an interview.

actually, it was right about the time GIM closed.

it's sort of "the exception that proves the role", just an interesting detail from silver history. the price manipulation in the raid that Maguire described was part of a larger manipulation that pushed the prices down.

[LuckyStrike]

Just trying to understand your criticism of TA, hoarder.

When there is a "correction", there is no change in the fundamental value of silver, so there's no need to come up with a fundamental explanation. There's only a change in price. That's why the move is technical.

Now it seems you're saying that TA tries to mask the fact that manipulation is going on. That's a completely wrong assertion. As a matter of fact, many technical moves are very much related to manipulation, and a good technical analyst should know that.

Most paper investment markets are manipulated, not just silver or gold. One could argue that the silver market is more manipulated because the market is relatively small, and because it's real value is much harder to pin a price on than, say, a corporation. And sharp out-of-the-blue sell-offs aren't unique to silver. Perhaps more exaggerated, but so are the upward spikes. Because silver price is so volatile, sometimes it's better to use TA on gold prices to figure out price moves in silver.

Market movers (manipulators) play off of investor sentiment. [Edit: Just saw Neuro's post on this.] Technical analysis is an attempt to anticipate how market manipulation and investor sentiment (neither of which is a fundamental) will affect price (not value!) in the short to medium term. Fundamentals change price over the long term. What's the long term? Roughly 15-20 years, but it can be longer or shorter depending on the market. The last secular bull market in gold lasted about 9 years, from the closing of the gold window in 1971 to the blowoff top in 1980. That one was unusually short, because it was a market that had an artificial government-imposed lid on it. In contrast, the bond market has been in a secular bull for 30 years, fueled by the fundamental of ever-decreasing interest rates that are now approaching zero.

My point is that technical analysis and manipulation are not mutually exclusive. They go hand-in-hand.

The problem with TA regarding PM markets specifically is they do not take into account political intervention. bernanke could announce 10 trillion in QE tomorrow and silver would be at 150 in 5 minutes and the charts aren't going to tell you that. Since PM's are largely an inflation hedge the short and intermediate charts are not able to even hope to predict major monetary or fiscal policy announcements.

I watch BrotherJohnF regularly on youtube and I think he is a good chartist, but his sentiments is rarely right, his tone seemed to be short term bearish a few weeks ago and silver ran to mid to high 30's then he was bullish and now it's back to low mid 30's. According to the chart he was right, but according to fundamentals it is always a good time to buy silver, and nobody can time it consistently.

[ximmy]

TPTB control the spot price of silver & gold to uphold the value of the dollar,
The goons manipulate metal because they know it is a currency.
Goons let it rise up and fall to take money from the paper investment sheeple.
Price charts provide a deceptive visual for these same sheeple investors.
TPTB want to control the death of the dollar in an orderly demise. During this time
pre-determined fluctuations in the metals market are designed to discourage metal holders
into relinquishing their metal for dollars or other faulty investments.
Metal will remain the number one safe-haven for monetary preservation.

~ximmy

[Neuro]

PM manipulation is done by the banking elite for the purpose of preventing PM's from becoming considered a viable alternative to FRN's. It is only manipulated DOWN and any up moves are caused by fundamentals.You got that almost right, but occassionally you see the UP manipulation too just prior to the smackdown, that is when it appears to go to the moon, resistance is broken usually in conjunction with articles by the guru's where we can expect prices 5-10 fold of todays prices. They corral the sheep in for shearing, and to stop the upward momentum they'll do quintuple margin raises (like last year), they do like to raise the spirit of the bulls, just to crush it later. Anyhow if you believe that you can make money trading according to TA that they invented, in this heavily manipulated and corrupt market, you'll deserve what you get. But if you deal in physical buy when market is depressed, and sell when it's euphoric, accumulating more at every turn, you will do well, fundamentally with inflation of fiat, you can't go wrong holding a significant amount of PM savings