Will there actually be a short squeeze? Will it boil over into the public? Probably not. But is there one brewing? Yes. Okay, here’s the news you can take a look at yesterday’s stories. Those are the stories we put out yesterday. Most of them are precious metals, energy, and what have you. Okay, so the markets. Ten year yields are $4.20, down $3.50, $1.0377, down $2.00. The S&P is $556.48, down $14.00. The VIX is $20.17, up $38.00. Gold is $30.36, down $8.00. Change was down, I think, $14.00. Silver $33.20, down $33.00, was down $1.25, I think at one point.

Copper, $5.01, down $4.50. Very volatile now. WTI, $68.21, down $48.00. Natural gas, $393, down $7.00. Bitcoin, unchanged, basically the 84 spot 100. Palladium, platinum, $9.46, $9.76, down $3.10, and change, and change. Soybeans, $10.02, offered down a penny. Corn, $4.57, offered unchanged, and wheat, $5.63, bid up a penny. Okay, there you go. Make no mistake, US recession would bring down the entire world. Very clickbaity headline, but he actually said it, and what he’s referring to, I think it’s important, because if you’re looking at, if you listen to us talk about HeartNet, or you read HeartNet’s work, you understand that HeartNet has believed for some time that a rotation out of US stocks and into international stocks is coming, and we’re in the middle of it now.

And you also may be familiar with the fact that we add to that, it’s not his job to say get short US stocks, it’s his job to say where his stocks will outperform. And so, US stocks should go down. This story says that if US stocks go down, it will eventually drag down the rest of the world with it. Is it LBMA, short-speeds, brewing, and silver? Well, that’s what we’re going to talk about today in a little bit. There’s the front page. Here we go. Is it LBMA, short-speeds, brewing, and silver? But first, a bonus.

We want to show you something that’s really scary. Semper Vigilante and I are mutuals on X, and he does a lot of granular analysis on silver, whether it be stock, whether it be the market itself, whether it be derivatives, specifically options. And he also has proprietary graphs that are very easy on the eyes and convey what he’s trying to explain very well. One of the things he has been hopping on lately, in addition to other people that are doing it, but he puts out some nice graphs. Unfortunately, I’m not showing those today, but I will include those in his post.

And one of the graphs, he had noted PSLV, short open interest, and SLV he had been watching for some time. And well, what caught my attention as a trader was he pretty much identified how an algo operates arbitraging SLV versus PSLV. The question is, why was it arbitraging these two ETFs? And so we took his concepts and created two charts for you. And we’re probably going to collaborate on a piece going forward for everyone to see, because his work is really good. And he’s a guy with a job, so he doesn’t do this for a living.

He does it for fun, but he’s certainly a good analyst. All right, so here’s what’s going to scare you. This is a graph of silver spikes in SLV shorts and coincident events. COVID, silver squeeze, Russian Ukraine war, India demand, China demand, all of those. You’ll note on the very far right, there is no spike related to the tariffs. That’s pretty scary, right? Okay, here’s something a little bit scarier. You ready? Silver spikes in SLV and PSLV shorts represented as a percentage of normalcy for the same time frame. PSLV is in yellow and SLV is in blue.

So look at the scale of the chart. It’s insane. Now, in terms of notional, it’s different, but it’s off the charts. So when you go through it, nothing happened during COVID, because nobody really knew about it. Silver squeeze, well, yeah, it happened during the silver squeeze because I think it was at that time that they were accumulating a lot of silver and pleading a lot of the Western warehouses. Russia, Ukraine war a little bit, India, not much, some stuff before then, China, a hiccup, but look at this. Meanwhile, SLV has no increase in shortages.

It’s actually low. Just let that scale just like sink in. It’s crazy, right? Why is it being picked on? Here’s the two charts together. So that’s pretty horrifying when we look at it that way. We’re going to talk about why it’s being picked on, but it has to do with a couple of things. One is ETFs are used as sources of metal when you have a hard time leasing it elsewhere. And another one is, and this is the more nefarious one. Well, we’re going to discuss the more nefarious one here as we get into this.

All right. Is the LBMA likely to have a short squeeze? Bad phrasing. On March 18th, ANZ bank published their periodic precious metals report. This particular one seemed far from routine and made a point of focusing on silver. It specifically emphasized physical market stress, supply dislocations and investment demand in its analysis. Now, in summary, the bank argues that silver remains undervalued relative to gold with the London market. It’s spearing, seeing tightening liquidity and the US struggling to secure adequate supply. Okay. That’s a mouthful. Forget about the relative to gold thing, but continuing investment flows, trade policies and structural deficits due to LBMA, COMEX dislocations will shape silver’s price action with ANZ raising their target to a 34 to 36 per ounce trading range in the short term in the light of these factors.

Now, whether I agree with that pricing prediction or not is irrelevant, but I do think it’ll be right, not in zero to three months, probably in three to six months, but that’s another conversation. There’s a chart of the spread between silver futures and spot, essentially an EFP COVID peak in 2020. We’re now above that. So I’ll give you an idea, the size of it. There’s more. Here’s some quotes from that report, which we covered quote on the LBMA silver shortage. Furthermore, there are increasing risks of a short squeeze. They use the word not me as LBMA swap the other positions are net short at the highest since 2020.

We believe these developments will keep silver vulnerable to a price spike on silver to accommodate new, new ETF demand. The ratio of LBMA silver stocks to silverback ETF holdings has fallen to a historical low of one. That’s significant. That’ll be part of the report that we do later on on the potentiality of higher prices, curing lower prices by prices, bring the metal out, right? And that will happen in scrap. They say, quote, over 70% of silver is mined as a byproduct of other metals, meaning even high silver prices won’t necessarily spare new mine to supply.

That’s right. Pull mickle out of the ground. You throw the earth on a pile, you throw some acid on it, you suck the silver out. They’ve been relying on that for decades. On tariffs and their effect on US supply, US domestic silver production meets less than 30% of the country’s total demand. US importers will struggle to adjust to tariffs, hence you’re seeing some front loading. But I think the tariffs are covered for something else. Gold’s not going to be tariffed. You can’t tariff monetary gold. It’s money. So why front run a silver tariff, which could be real.

All right, next topic. Trump just expanded critical mineral output using wartime powers. If you’re looking for signs of silver stress, look to what President Trump did yesterday. He signed a new EO to pursue mineral independence. We’re having a problem getting metals. We have to pull as much here as we can. Can we get an EO? That’s how people get bailed out. If you are looking, okay, I said that. The executive order issued Thursday activates the Cold War Era Defense Production Act, DPA. It directs federal agencies to finance, support, and fast track projects related to processing critical minerals within the US.

The order treats foreign dependence on these minerals as a national security risk. There’s the cover page. We have the full story. Hosted, Trump EO invokes wartime powers to expand critical mineral output. Final point before we move on. I’ve been getting more and frequent requests about which physical dealers we’d recommend for purchasing metal. In response, Monday, we will list the dealers we have used in the past and we’re happy with and would use again based on trust, reliability, delivery times, and price transparency. Price itself is something you shop for only after you secure those four things.

That’s what matters to us. Moving on. FOMC was this week. Nothing is scheduled today. It’s 8.22 now. Okay, I got through that actually pretty quickly. Oh, Semper Vigilante. It’s at Semper Vigilante 1, I think. But I’ll include it in the post itself. But we’re going to be working together on this topic because two guys from the same mind approaching it from different angles. Very good. Okay, silver, gold, S&P, silver again. I got nothing really to say here. I mean, you want to add value or you want to fill people’s minds with nonsense. I guess I could fill your mind with nonsense if you’re willing to listen.

All right, here we are. We’re on a weekly high in gold. There are technical indicators not on this screen that tell me the market is going to roll over. Now, I don’t have them here. They’re not here right now. They’re not showing up right now. But I’m always the worry wart. So I would say, here’s the cautionary point I want to make. If everything I’m saying about silver is true, why the hell is it not higher? Right? Well, that’s because they will move mountains, not mountains with silver in them, but the federal government will move mountains to protect the franchise that is US banking.

And US banking knows that too big to fail. And US banking, as a result, will frequently get into crowded trades, leaning on the ignorance of government to bail them out. And we’re looking at a situation like that now. Can a silver squeeze take down a bullion bank, take down a bank, a small one? Yeah, a big one? No, no way, no way. The government’s going to step in. They stepped in on the Hump brothers, right, to save the mining industry, allegedly, right? They stepped in in 2020. They stepped in during the famous retail silver squeeze when JP Morgan, remember JP Morgan during Europe hours announced, we think European miners are a sale.

And that was the end of the squeeze. So you’re seeing that manifest now. But this is chronic and longer term. So when I push back against ANZ and I say, zero to three months, 34 to 36, I love to see that. And statistically, that makes complete sense from a supply demand point of view. I like their work. But when you’re looking at an existential threat to an industry that governments need more than anything else, as we transition from one economy style to another, well, then you’re looking at they’ll do whatever it takes, they will move mountains with or without silver in the mountains to protect their industries.

And so does that mean get out? No, it means that what I said about gold in the past many times now applies to silver. Number one, they want the silver. Why? We don’t know. Will it be permanent? I think it will be. It might not be. Two. Ultimately, they do not care about the price of gold and silver anymore. They care about the speed with which it attains those prices. Everything a bank does is to buy time. Everything is thrown out on the yield curve, thrown down the road, using ETFs to satisfy longer term commitments, right? We don’t.

We have the silver, LBMA, I’m sorry, LME or whatever it is, BOE or whatever they are, right, whatever entity it is, we have the silver, we have the gold. We just need more time to get it to you. Okay. Two days becomes 62 days becomes 92 days. That’s them punting out on the curve a metal that they know doesn’t get destroyed. Okay, so it’s not the price that they care about anymore. It’s the speed, which is why I push back against ANZ and I say zero to three months, 34 to 36. I’ll call that a 10% chance of happening.

However, $40 in 12 months, I call that a 40% chance of happening. You follow? We’re not looking for price spikes in home runs here. We’re looking for a slow orderly rally. They cannot repeal physics. They can, however, slow it down. I’m Vince. Have a great day. Have a great weekend. Well, thank you as always for tuning into today’s markets and metals with Vince Lancy. I sure hope you had fun. I really hope you had a great week here. Following this exciting rally, we finally saw gold go over $3,000 an ounce last week and then shoot higher this week.

So a lot of fun, especially if you’ve been watching these gold and silver markets for a decade or so. And I had a case before we wrap up, did want to wish you a happy weekend and also say thank you to first majestic silver who kindly brought us today’s show with Vince. And just as a reminder first majestic recently did have their earnings out, which gave them record free cashflow in the fourth quarter of 2024 as well as a full year of 2024. Obviously first majestic has now closed their deal with gato silver.

So going to have higher silver and gold production and certainly at a good time as the golden silver prices well silver down a little bit today, but gold still over $3,000 an ounce silver on the higher end of its range. And first majestic benefiting from that, particularly in this month of March here, where you can see back down on the second of March at 5 36 and still above the $7 level early on Friday morning. So thank you again to first majestic. Thank you for watching at home. Go out, have a great weekend and we’ll look forward to seeing you again on Monday.

Please note that this video is not intended as legal licensed financial trading advice and is to be used for informational purposes only. Please contact your financial advisor before making any decisions. And thanks for watching. [tr:trw].

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