Institutional investors, having taken massive profits in gold and silver over the last three weeks, are now placing bets on a re-rally to as high as $3,500 by December 31st. Welcome to the Morning Markets and Metals with Vince Lancey. Where each morning Vince brings you the financial and precious metals news to get you ready for your day. And now, here’s Vince. Good morning, everyone. I’m Vince Lanci. Today’s gold fixed market rundown. Happy Monday, as it were. We have two stories. Big bets for $3,500 a place. That’s a serious story. And how to lose your gold. Well, it’s serious for the person who lost the gold, but pretty light compared to other things going on right now.

Let’s start with the markets. Here’s the front page. Let’s start with the markets. Because the 10-year yield is up 5. The dollar is 106.86, down 70. S&P 500 is up 31.32. At 59.78, the VIX is 1951, a little bit lower. Gold is 28.74, up 16. That’s after up another, up 19, after Trump made his statement on Friday. Silver, 31.61, up a pretty strong 49, almost 50. Copper, 454, up 1%. Think tariffs, although it’s not one-to-one, think tariffs. WTI 7039, up 17. Disappointing, considering that tariffs are going into effect tomorrow, allegedly. Natural gas, 397, up 4.

Bitcoin, 93,100, down a grand, but up significantly off the lows. We’ll show a chart of that. Palladium, 936, up 19. Platinum, 956, up 9. Well, there you go. We get our palladium from other countries. We still get it from Russia, despite the sanctions. Soy, 1010, down a penny, corn, 4.52, down 4 cents, and wheat, 5.55, down 0.4. I’m not so sure what tariffs do directly to affect grains, but there could be some effects. All right. These are the stories we put out over the weekend. FedEx loses $20,000 in shipped gold and silver. We’re going to discuss that.

Institutions place big bets for $3,500. We will discuss that. We had an interview with Michael Oliver that will be sent out during the week in its entirety to premium subscribers. It was very good. It was very relaxed, a lot of questions and answers that he was kind enough to stick around for. Now, that’s the early look that went out to founders. Michael Hartnett over the weekend, gold is the new bonds. That’s not his statement. It’s ours. It’s an observation based on some things he said. Founders, special Sunday reading. You can see a little goat in that picture with a gun on his back and carrying gold.

So if you know who Tom Longo is, you know what that is. We’re sharing a little content back and forth with our subscribers now. Watch Trump Zielinski meeting gets hostile. OK, first story, woman loses gold, silver in FedEx accident. A North Carolina woman trying to recover a lost $20,000 shipment of gold and silver coins that disappeared while in transit with FedEx. Barb Cocotec shipped the package in late January, expecting delivery within days. Instead, four weeks later, it was reportedly stuck at the FedEx World Hub in Memphis, Tennessee. This is reportedly by Fox in Memphis. We’re out of pocket over $20,000 at this moment, Cocotec said, calling the situation very, very stressful.

The shipment here will put Barb up there being stressed out. The shipment intended for sale at J.M. Bullion included gold and silver coins along with silver bars. After noticing delays, Cocotec contacted FedEx on February 6th. She was told the package had been located, but by February 27th, it was still missing. We have that full story linked right underneath. There you go. We would say Barbara is either a person who really is suffering a loss or she has invented a brand new way of having boat accidents for missing silver and gold. So take note, those of you with gold and silver and little USB drives with your Bitcoin in it, you don’t have to have a boating accident.

You could just ship it via FedEx and you might be taken care of there. All right. Next, institutions place big bets for $3,500. Institutional clients are buying binary or digital style options for the second half of the year from banks as they take profits now. The bets are for $3,300 by the end of July and or $3,500 by the end of December. Those are in play. They give 10 to 1 payouts if they hit. The bottom line is if the market is anywhere near $3,300 or $3,500 as deadlines appear, these tend to behave like gamma squeeze daily options acting as magnets to their strike prices and frequently beyond for prices themselves.

Now, here’s a rudimentary chart that we drew up for you, the P&O graph of a binary option. We’re going to explain this graph in detail and much more about how these things operate at the bottom in premium. So there’s your binary. You’re sleeping. You’re sleeping. You’re sleeping. One day you wake up. Boom. You’re up a Brazilian dollars. OK, so you’ve got a little bit of money. You’re up a lot of money. That’s their binary. They you may say, oh, that’s a lottery ticket. They’re not a lottery ticket. They’re better than a lottery ticket. But they do have that simply speaking.

That’s how they appear. All right. We’re going to we have a full explanation in premium below. OK, we also have a full trade idea and details in that post we just alluded to moving on market news. A lot of news over the weekend. It’s the error of Trump again. So a lot of market moving news, I should say. President Trump will impose tariffs on Mexico and Canada on Tuesday, but it’s still deciding on the levels. Commerce secretary Howard Lutnik has said Trump had previously. I’m not going to read that CFT. Trump said he was going to have tariffs imposed February 4th came and went.

Canada and Mexico asked for time. Trump gave it to them. The month is up. And surprisingly to me, they are going into effect, at least threatening to go into effect again. And we’ll find out tomorrow. The last time he implemented these tariffs on February 4th, oil was very strong. Stocks were very weak. That is not happening today. OK, what you are seeing happening is oil is unchanged. Stocks are strong. But I’m not so sure that the tariff threat is weighing on this at all because the markets have a lot of other news to digest. Also, virtual currencies rallied on Sunday after President Donald Trump announced the creation of a U.S.

Strategic Digital Asset Reserve. That will include BTC and Ether, as well as XRP, Solana’s SOL token and Cardano’s ADA. On the right, you have the whole crypto universe, well, most of the crypto universe, the ones that people even know about. And although they are all down today, I might pull up the charts later on, but Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Cardano, ADA, Cardano and Ripple obviously doing very well. Ethereum lagging. Everything spiked. And this is a retracement of that. But Cardano, ADA, Cardano and Ripple, I think, were the ones that did the best out of them all. And that should tell you what’s what the market is focused on right now.

So it’s like, you know, what’s going to rally the most to all the ones that people care about the most? And those are Bitcoin, which is evergreen and people caring about the most because it’s Bitcoin. And then you have ADA, Cardano, which has more privacy protections, depending on how you look at it. And Ripple, which is becoming the item that is being seen most potentially as a backbone for FX markets, replacing things like banks, you know. So then Trump is not a big bank person. So if Trump doesn’t like finance and doesn’t like banks and does like technology as a tool to mitigate intermediaries, well, Ripple’s your man.

That’s what I would say. Moving on to geopolitics. Israel and Ukraine in the headlines. Ukraine might be obvious based on the conversation that Trump and Zelensky had. People are. Do I have that here? People are pushing back, saying it was a it was an ambush, the Trump Zelensky conversation. And I would say, yeah, it was. But he’s supposed to know how to handle an ambush. You know, that’s that’s the point. He’s that’s what politics is. It’s anticipating and dealing with ambushes. So and he fell for it. What kind of military leader is that? You know, anyway, so after that meeting, Zelensky says he wants peace, but will require security guarantees.

His other statements were much more. Reconciliatory, you know, or conciliatory Hamas state going back to Israel now, Hamas official said the group will not agree to extend the first phase of the ceasefire deal and that the hostage release will only occur when the agreed phase deal continues. OK, so the ceasefire is relatively close to ending. I’m not sure the dates and Israel and Hamas are probably going to go back at it again based on the news that I’m reading. The other the other thing that Zelensky said was, you know, we’re ready to sign the minerals deal, even though there wasn’t one.

I think most importantly, geopolitically, if you have the patience to read it and you are interested, you want to read. Missed by Russia’s foreign minister, Medved Lavrov. OK, he spells out the fact that Trump is a pragmatist with the slogan common sense and a discussion in Europe about peacekeepers for Ukraine is arrogant. Now, I’m giving you a sound bite of sound bites. Basically, he wants to work with Trump. He doesn’t want to work with with Europe. So Europe wants to have peacekeepers there. It’s a big border. It’s not very practical. And he talks about a lot.

You’re going to get whenever he talks, you’re going to get some truth that you can just really take a look at. And well, and a couple of our founders had noted that to me. So Russian Defense Ministry said Russian forces captured two new U.S. villages, which is the point when you’re negotiating for peace, you never come to the table negotiating for peace, what you cannot win with war. So you win as much as you can as peace is coming up. That’s kind of what Israel is doing as well. On deck today, NFP and tariffs tomorrow. On deck this week, I should say tariffs tomorrow.

Non-farm payrolls on Friday and Jerome Powell speaks as well. OK, stay with us. And we’re going to discuss in more detail, as you can see there, a little bit of a preview of the binary option and how this will play out. However, first, let’s take a look at the markets. In summary, before we actually take a look at some charts, institutional investors, having taken massive profits in gold and silver over the last three weeks, are now placing bets on a rerally to as high as thirty five hundred by December thirty first. That’s good. All right.

Gold. Moving averages are back in play for silver. I’m not so sure if they are in play for gold yet, but let’s take a look at what we have here. Make this bigger. So there’s your gold daily. Oh, no, it’s the end of the world. Paraphrasing Michael Oliver. Oh, no, the top is in. It’s the end of the world. And we’re now up almost forty dollars off the lows of last week. I’ll make this a little bit bigger. Moving averages. Let’s see what happens when the moving average is met here. This is the 50 day, I believe.

Silver. Silver, you’re in that moving average area and I’m not showing it here, but you want to look at the 200 day moving average when we get there. That’s that’s where we are. But everything is reacting very nicely off of the moving average. Silver bouncing off of moving average is like gold bouncing off of some invisible moving average. So that’s it’s very good. Copper. Right. Up one percent above its moving averages. People are thinking about the tariffs and precious metals. OK, number one, to get it out of the way, tariffs are bullish for gold. Period. Tomorrow, the next day.

No, but over six months for two reasons. Tariffs are protectionist. Tariffs restrict the flow of goods, which means you restrict the flow of money. That’s deflationary. However, because the U.S. is now interested in using tariffs again and we’ve sanctioned and then confiscated the wealth of Russia. If I am a country that holds dollars and tariffs are being threatened, well, that’s a step towards sanctions and sanctions are now a step towards a nuclear option finance, and that will be confiscation of wealth. So all tariffs do is they accelerate or they push me over the edge on any decision I have to say sell treasuries and buy gold as a replacement for it.

Now, in terms of the actual market activity and behavior, gold, if you think if you think the tariffs are going to crush the world economy, then everything goes down. Gold probably does not. If you think the tariffs are going to be more pointed and affect the economy. Well, then you have to look at each item that’s affected like silver. Right. And you say, is this is this is this a supply demand situation? So is the demand elastic or inelastic? So, for example, if we were to tariff silver or not have he’s tariffing the world. OK.

So if he if he were to tariff silver and silver were to explode higher, then that’s saying that our demand is inelastic no matter the price, we’re going to buy it. Right. And it’s also it also makes other countries come in and buy more concentrate before the price hits. So it’s bullish for silver. I think the report that we saw on that from Citibank was it’s good for 5 percent and silver, meaning the the. A tariff on refined silver is good for a silver products or silver in industrial products is good for 5 percent to spot and gold is good for 2 percent to spot.

And interestingly enough, I have copper up there. Copper is kind of. Conflicted and here’s what I mean. We don’t need other people to sell us copper. So if you if you have copper to 100 percent, then we’ll just that’s the point. We’ll develop our own right. We’ll we’ll just buy our own copper. The question is, will we export less copper to people who buy it from us? Yes, we will. And what will they do? Because we’re going to look the point of tariffs is we’re going to charge 25 percent on your finished copper that’s coming to us.

Right. And simultaneously, oh, that’s not the headline. Simultaneously, we will be less likely to export our raw copper that you refine and sell back to us. OK, so raw materials stop going out. And finished materials stop coming in. It’s a two way street with tariffs. So the rest of the world has to pay find other sources of copper. And to the extent that there are other sources out there, then copper doesn’t go up in price to the extent that there are not other sources out there. Then copper goes up in price. So let’s take a look at it this way.

Let’s look at copper. Right. And there’s there’s an application silver here. The U.S. says to the world, all your copper finished goods, 25 percent higher, because we’re going to protect our own industry here. OK, we don’t want your finished copper. We’ll make our own. And the rest of the world, which, by the way, buys raw copper from us, concentrate from us, says, OK, fine. Then we’ll sell it to someone else. And they continue to buy the raw copper, maybe less, maybe less, because there’s less final demand from the U.S. at a price they can sell. And they say, all right, we’ll buy your raw copper.

And the U.S. says, we’re not going to sell it to you. Right. The raw material stops getting exported if we do it right. And the other countries, then they say, oh, shit, we’re going to get a raw copper. And they start to deplete the stores that are on exchanges. So copper could be bullish depending on the above ground supply that’s available in the story. It could be bearish because there’s plenty of copper. So it really comes down to how plentiful are the above ground supply. So copper is kind of a shit show. Goldman was bearish on copper.

Citibank was bearish on copper under tariffs. And now Goldman is bullish on copper. So I think, you know, it’s in play. I think the wild card is trying to hear anyway. So that’s it. Enough on that. Bitcoin. So you can see here’s the daily Bitcoin. Right. There you go. Bitcoin is Bitcoin’s going to zero, acting like a tech stock. And then you have a massive bounce. This is a weekend weekend, you know, Saturday, Sunday. Right. And you could see that the reaction to to Trump’s announcement was very favorable. The question is, is it as favorable as it was last time? Does he mean it this time? It seems like he means it.

But the market is reacting mutedly, at least initially. Right. So you might want to might want to say, like, I would want to see Bitcoin continue higher as stocks go higher. I would want to see Bitcoin as a trader. Right. But as an investor, I mean, we’re going to as an owner of Bitcoin. Right. And I owned Ethereum at one time as an owner of Bitcoin. Yeah, we’re going to have a strategic Bitcoin reserve, but we’re not going to announce it. We’re not going to buy it. We already have the coin. Right. You already have the coins.

The point of a strategic reserve is stated purpose is to use it as a defense mechanism if someone weaponizes it against you, which leads to you weaponizing it against everyone first. OK, you don’t announce it. You just buy it. You drive the price lower. You buy it like you do in gold anyway. So that’s it. Again, I’m Vince. Have a great day. Well, thanks for watching this morning’s markets and metals with Vince. We sure appreciate you tuning in and starting your day with us here. Hope you enjoyed the show and we’ll see you again tomorrow. Please note that this video is not intended as legal license financial trading advice and is to be used for informational purposes only.

Please contact your financial adviser before making any decisions. And thanks for watching. Thank you. [tr:trw].

See more of Arcadia Economics on their Public Channel and the MPN Arcadia Economics channel.