➡ Raf from The Endgame Investor discusses the current state of the silver market. He notes that silver is being moved from exchanges in London, New York, and Shanghai to private hands, possibly for use in industries like solar panel production. He also mentions that the price of gold and silver is likely to stabilize soon, and encourages people to buy silver while prices are low. Raf also discusses the importance of having physical gold and silver on hand in case of economic instability, and the balance between faith and practical preparation.
➡ The amount of registered silver available for sale in New York is decreasing rapidly, with 108 million ounces leaving the market in the past five months. This silver isn’t going into storage or to Chinese or London exchanges, but likely into private hands or industry. This decrease in supply could lead to more volatile futures prices and potentially higher prices in dollar terms. The exact destination and reason for this silver drain are unknown.

Hey guys, Raf here from The Endgame Investor and today I wanted to ask one question. Dude, where’s my silver? Dude, where’s my car? Where’s your car, dude? Dude, where’s my car? Dude, where’s my car? Where’s your car, dude? There are a lot of things going on in different exchanges in London, in New York and Shanghai and it is unclear where all of the silver that used to be in those exchanges where it’s all going. They’re all being drained, all three of the exchanges, so all we can say is that it’s not going to the exchanges, it’s going to private hands that are either stacking the silver, using the silver, or making a whole lot of solar panels, or whatever they’re doing with it.

Sometimes we just don’t want to ask. I could think of a few things. One would involve some ice cubes and a nine iron. Two would include a buffalo, live or stuffed, preferably stuffed for safety’s sake. What I really wanted to make clear is that as the price of gold and silver bounces around looking for a place to settle, open interest on the futures market in New York primarily is way down for both metals, meaning the speculators are already gone. It vanished like a fart in the wind! So even though we might be a bit away from the next leg up in both metals, I don’t think we’re going to get much lower than this in price.

I think we’re going to settle around here, up and down, bouncing around until the market finally finds some rest. And from there, we’ll continue to the next leg up. In the meantime, get your silver while premiums are still low with Miles Franklin, link in the description below. Take some gold and silver, put it in a dirty man’s safe, use the code endgame10 at checkout. You want some gold and silver that you have immediately on hand so that you don’t have to access it through a computer or something goes wrong and the endgame comes and the internet doesn’t work for a while.

I’m not one of those guys or preppers that thinks that the endgame is going to go down forever, but there could be some difficulty once the dollar does collapse in getting credit through the system because there won’t be any credit. And so operating these huge capital intensive industries is going to be very difficult at first. And in that case, you want some gold and silver on hand immediately. And check out the Patreon at patreon.com slash endgameinvestor for as little as $3 a month just to keep out the obnoxious commentary. And last week we discussed the dialectic between faith and prepping.

There has to be a balance between both approaches because if you only do prepping and you have no faith, then your life is empty. And if you only have faith and you don’t do what you need to do to protect yourself practically, then you probably won’t have a life at all. So do both and do them wisely. Check it out at the Patreon in the link in the description below. And let’s go on with the question of dude, where’s my silver? So before we get into silver, I want to go into gold to the stocks ratio.

The higher this is, the cheaper stocks are in gold terms. You can see here these huge candle sticks, these wicks up here. This is the top. And then we have the crash, the quote unquote, crashing gold and silver, mostly silver, not really much in gold. But excluding those wicks on a weekly closing basis, gold continues to climb relative to stocks. We are now at 0.738 S&P 500 unit per ounce of gold. And so while these wicks make it look like there’s been a little bit of some volatility in the gold market, if you smooth it out on a weekly candle basis, it’s not even there.

Let’s keep going. Gold open interest steady at around 400,000 contracts. 400,000 contracts is very low. It’s about a 10 year low in open interest. That means all of the speculators that normally flood the futures market when price is volatile, they’re not showing up now. You can see this huge crash in open interest from 540,000 contracts to about 400,000. And as gold has been drifting higher from a low of about 4,400 over here after the after that little crash event, we’re now back above 5,000. We’re going up and above and below 5,000, dancing around that line.

And meanwhile, open interest continues to fall and is now still at around 400,000, not 400,000, 6,000 contracts. This is a lot of room to run in the futures market. And we see the same thing in silver open interest. Silver open interest is near two year lows at about 132,000 contracts. You can see the last two times that we hit this level of open interest or around this level of open interest. This was where the silver price was. Either time, it would have been very good buys, and they were local lows. And if we go back to this time, we were just below 130,000, about 127,000, 128,000 in August of 2024.

Silver has not hit that level since except once in April 2025. And from there, it blew up and went to 120. And now we’re only at about 7880, whatever it is when you’re watching this. But in terms of speculative open interest, these are very good numbers to start building your positions in silver if you haven’t yet, and to get some physical if you haven’t yet. The open interest is not going to get much lower than this. It can only increase from here. Is it possible? Sure. Anything’s possible, but likely open interest is going to increase from here.

And as that happens, price will increase as well. The biggest drop in silver open interest happened after the crash, curiously. You can see here that this is the big silver crash from about 120 to about 70. And we were still at about 155,000 contracts over here. The big crash in open interest only happened afterwards. And it still continues down to this day, right about 132,000 contracts. We could get to as low as 120 or so. I don’t think we’re going to get that low, but if we do, it’s going to be even a better buy for silver prices.

But if you buy here, we buy a little later, whether you’re going to buy in the mid seventies or the mid sixties, it really doesn’t matter even medium term, though it’s always satisfying to get a good entry price. Silver out of backwardation for now backwardation in this sense is not a forward curve inversion, but it is when prices of physical gold that you can supposedly get in London are more expensive than the futures price for silver that you can get in New York. So here we are at 0.5, 656 cents premium of New York over London.

That means that the backwardation is now over the first time we had backwardation. And this cycle was in October when silver first hit 50 and then it was in there for about three weeks or so. And then it kind of evened out and bounced around zero, which is where it usually is. But after that prices started to go a little bit berserk and we were stuck in backwardation from about January to mid February for about six weeks here. And now it looks like we’ve gone out of it again, but we could be back in it Tuesday or Wednesday since it’s Washington’s birthday.

I don’t call it presidency because presence day is stupid and I don’t like presidents, but Washington, I have some respect for. So I’ll call it Washington’s birthday since it is his birthday. And he deserves to have that recognition, not to mention the fact that trying to erase his name from this day is cultural erosion and all of the United States is feeling that now as zombies take over the country. Oh, let me help you, George Washington. I still want to help you. I want to help you, George Washington. So now that silver is out of backwardation.

The last time silver went out of backwardation after a long time in it was October and we saw what happened to the price now. We’ll see what happens at the price this time, but the whole silver market is extremely unstable. As you can see from these crazy zigzags over here in the premium or the discount between London and New York, this is supposed to stay steady as it did around here in this area. But now it’s clearly not. There’s a lot of interesting things happening. Monetary metals confirmed. Monetary metals, of course, the place where you can earn gold and silver interest on your gold and silver investments with monetary metals.

Check the link in the description below where this is the chart. They have the silver basis when the red line is above the blue line. That means there is a premium for physical over futures, which means backwardation, at least in Keith’s language, Keith Wiener, CEO of monetary metals. You can see the backwardation became extreme over here during the silver crash, and it has barely resolved itself. At the very end here, you see the blue line above the red line, but I don’t know if this is going to hold. It didn’t hold here.

It didn’t hold here. It might not hold this time. And if we continue in backwardation, that just means that the entire market is deteriorating. And how is it deteriorating? How can we see that in the chart? Well, the registered silver supply is falling at the fastest rate ever. True, this is after moving higher at the fastest rate ever. This is the amount of silver, registered silver, available for sale against silver futures contracts in New York after rising at the fastest pace possible at the fastest pace ever. It is now falling at the fastest pace ever.

We are down to about 93 million ounces. And where is it going? Well, first of all, you can see from this chart, it’s not going into storage. Storage is this lineup here that’s eligible. It’s just silver and storage is not for sale. This is the registered supply. This is the supply that is for sale against contracts. So you can see over here in these rectangles, the registered supply would go down and the storage supply, the eligible supply will go up. So that means that some of this stuff for sale is just going to storage in the same lockers, but not with warrants or tags to be for sale.

You saw the same thing here, registered supply going down, eligible supply going up or meandering higher. This time we’re seeing both the registered and eligible supply. You see this line is going down. That’s the eligible. That’s the storage. This line is going down. That’s the registered. They’re both going down at the same time, which means the silver is leaving. It’s not moving from the registry just to storage in New York. It’s leaving the vault entirely. Where’s it going and how much? Well, if you look at a zoom in of the registered silver stockpile that we saw in the previous chart, this chart is a long term.

This chart is short term. So the last six months it peaked out, the silver registered supply peaked at about 201 million ounces or so. Now we’re at 93. So that’s about how much? 108 million ounces drained out in five months. Where is it going? And we already covered it’s not going into New York eligible storage. We just saw that in this chart over here because both of these lines are going down. Where’s it going? It’s not going to China. This is the Chinese Shanghai silver supply down to 450.45 tons. It keeps going lower and lower.

There’s no spike here. There hasn’t been a spike since 2020. It’s been going down since 2021. Maybe there’s a minor one in 2022, but it was insignificant. But we know for sure is that the silver that is draining from New York is at least it’s might be going to China, but it’s not going to the Chinese exchanges. It could be going to industry. It could be going to other places, but it’s not going to the Shanghai exchange. That’s for sure. At most how much is going into London? At most a fraction is going to London.

Remember, we just saw this chart over here from September, October, and here now we are in February. So if we go here, this is September, October, and we had 844 million ounces of silver in London, and now there’s 891 million. So it’s a little bit of a spike, but it’s really not that significant. It’s less than 50 million ounces. And remember this chart over here, this is about 108 million ounces. So a fraction of it at most is going into London and that’s it. So where is it going? Well, it’s not going to any of the exchanges.

It’s going into private hands. It’s going into industry. It’s going into who knows who actors or players that don’t trust dollar as a reserve anymore. And maybe they’re hoarding silver. We don’t know why we can make up a whole bunch of stories and I could try to convince you, but I really don’t know. I just know it’s leaving the exchanges, which means that there’s less liquidity in the exchanges, which means that futures prices in Shanghai, in London, in New York are all going to get a lot more volatile as the supply gets lower and lower and the prices eventually will shoot higher in dollar terms, which doesn’t even mean the prices are higher.

It just means the dollar is a lot lower and you know, that’s all where it’s going. How much longer is this process going to take? I don’t know. I hope not very long because it looks like we’re near a singularity point in AI. So we have a race between hyperinflation and singularity where Skynet takes over and we’re all doomed. I hope the dollar collapses first and collapses AI with it and we’ll see what happens. But stay safe out there and stay away from computers. They’re going to eat all of our brains pretty soon.

You know what? In a large way, they already have. [tr:trw].

See more of Rafi Farber on their Public Channel and the MPN Rafi Farber channel.