➡ The price of gold has been rising, while the number of open contracts in the gold futures market has been falling, indicating a short squeeze. This trend has been ongoing for the last four months, particularly in the last six weeks. Despite significant price changes, the futures market isn’t driving the gold price, suggesting other factors are at play. Meanwhile, gold supplies in New York have significantly decreased, but silver supplies continue to rise, indicating different market behaviors for these two metals.

Hey guys, Raf here from The Endgame Investor. And gold is going up, going down, going up again. Three digits each day. $100 up, $110 down, $120 up. It’s crazy out there. Let’s keep in mind what Keith Wieder said on our last interview. Suppose you’re on the deck of a ship. And number one, the ship is slowly sinking because there’s little holes in the hull. And number two, there’s a big storm, and the waves are going up and down, you know, 20 meters. And so you’re standing on the deck of the ship looking at a lighthouse, which of course is attached to the dry land.

And you say, why is the lighthouse going up and down and mostly up? Well, your vantage point is just not objective. If you’re looking at things the wrong way, if you could just simply get in a drone and go above the whole thing, you could see the ship doing this. The Lighthouse is not going up and down. You just need some perspective. It’s the dollar that’s shaking and it’s gold that is steady. Why is the dollar shaking? Because one day there’s triple digit tariffs on China. Then the next day we’re working out a deal and we’re all friends again that changes the flows of goods and services and trade throughout the world and affects everything.

And because the dollar is the reserve currency of all of the currencies, it’s the dollar that gets affected the most and thereby everything down the line. And because the dollar is the main gold derivative through which people enact trade, it’s the gold price that will be so volatile. Silver, yes, is still money. It is a monetary asset, but because of the 1873 crime against silver, when the dollar shifted from a buy metallic silver and gold standard, which was not perfect in itself, to an exclusively gold standard, monetary demand for silver has been masked and continues to be masked.

So silver will be less volatile through these tariff wars and these waves in the ocean. Gold will be more volatile because it is explicitly the base of the dollar. Whereas silver since 1873 is not an illegal basis. But what I really wanted to say in this video is that the volatility in gold right now is not showing up in the gold futures markets. I was listening to my favorite gold and silver analyst, Daniel Oliver of Mermechan Capital. I hope to have him on the channel at some point soon. He was saying, in previous global markets, which was mostly driven by Western spec money, right? And the way Western markets work, as you know, as the price goes up, you get more margin capacities.

You buy some more and it goes up and your friend buys and now you can buy and so you get this levered effect. And because of spec money, it also tends to build the miners at the same time. And then there’s some problem. You get a margin call, the trap door opens and everything collapses. Well, that’s not really going to happen this time, in my view, because the buyers of the bullion are not levered speculators that are vulnerable to some kind of margin call. They’re central banks or sovereign wealth funds or institutions like that.

They don’t get margin calls. Now, what I really want to talk about today is the lack of activity in the futures market and the fact that open interest, the amount of contracts open, gold contracts specifically open on the COMEX. Despite yesterday’s triple digit plunge in the gold price, open interest actually went up. And this has only happened twice in the history of gold trading, at least as far as Grok is concerned, I couldn’t find the data raw, but I did ask Grok the question and it gave me a decent estimate of the information that I was looking for.

I’ll share you that table in the slides coming up. And this video is brought to you by my own substag. Check it out there for three times weekly update on the monetary sewer system. And if you want to stack your gold and silver, do it with miles Franklin. You won’t get fooled by any numismatic premium crap. Just straight bullion with the lowest premiums possible. And if you want to store your gold and silver in a dirty man safe, do so with the link in the description below and use the code endgame10 at checkout for 10% off for the most low tech way to store your metals.

And I believe one of the most secure as long as you don’t tell anybody. Here we see a table. It’s a beautiful table. It’s one of the most beautiful tables I’ve ever produced on AI. And I don’t really produce much tables on AI because frankly, I hate AI, but it’s a good shortcut. I can’t avoid it completely. Just like I can’t avoid any technological innovation completely. I have running water. I have a computer. I live in a house. There’s a fan on my ceiling, all those other kinds of things. I asked chat, not chat GPT.

I asked grok the question, or really I demanded of grok show me the top 10 gold down moves from the last 10 years and the corresponding move in open interest on those days. So it showed me this. I have the top 10 moves down, the daily price drop in dollars that on almost all of these days, except for two, that’s 80% of these days, open interest went down on that day. Now Grok gives me some nice notes. You can see here, for example, the note on September 17th, 2008 financial crisis, margin calls led to liquidations.

Open interest likely dropped. Doesn’t have the direct data, but because of estimated data and other surrounding information, Grok is estimating that open interest dropped on this day. If you want to comment below and you have the raw data, please send it in. And yeah, if we can compile it in the comments, I’ll make another video of the raw data. So this can be more accurate, but I think this is basically accurate still. So we have November 12th, 2008, continued crisis about today, deleveraging reduced open interest. These are moves of 85 down, 70 down in dollars in gold, open interest liquidating because people need to raise dollars.

Shorts need to raise dollars so they cover, so they have their dollars back. And so they can use them for other margin calls. Now you have these other moves, April 15th, 2013, that’s the biggest moving gold of $140 down, taper tantrums, ETF outflows, excuse me, and liquidation slashed open interest. The only two exceptions to these are August 11th, 2011, and August 11th, 2020, when open interest was up $2,000 contracts on August 11th, 2011, and up 1500 contracts on August 11th, 2020. Now, what does that mean? What it means is that new longs are opening up positions on the dip.

There is buying on weakness here. It means that new bets are being made, that gold will go even higher. But it also means that existing longs are not selling on the dump. They’re not panicking out. So what I think this is, is a major bullish signal coupled by what you’ll see in the screens that follow, that gold is pretty much done following maybe a few days left, but we’re not going to follow much in price from here. This is yesterday’s table from the CME. What you see here is the closing open interest of $441,429 contracts, which you’ll see in the next slide is still very low, but the change, a positive change of 3,158 contracts.

Now, if you look down this entire line over here where it says change, and you zoom in on this chart, it shows that open interest was up in every expiration on the gold futures market. There was heavy buying in spot, which had a change of 623 contracts. That’s spot. That means you have to accept delivery of it randomly. If your number is called, that means if you’re buying spot contract, you are risking delivery of physical gold, at least a warrant for one specific 100 ounce bar. See, in July, you end up 1,181 contracts.

In August, we have 19,742 contracts. In September and October and November and December and February and April and August 2026, we were only down two contracts in June 2026. Other than that, we’re up in every single expiration. That means there’s a lot of longs that are betting on gold here going out way into the future. These are very bullish bets. You see here the change of 3,158, and then you can see all of these numbers all going up except for the active contract of July, which was down 21,188. Despite that huge fall in open interest in July, all of these other increases made up for it, and then some by 3,158 contracts.

If we move back to here on a regular Zoom, remember that number 3,158, that is more than the increase on August 11, 2011 and August 11, 2020, when both had plunges in the gold price similar to what we saw yesterday. Now, if we move to a slightly broader view of the last six months, we can see the interplay of the gold price versus open interest, especially open interest lately over the last six or so weeks. What you can see here is that the price is moving from about 2,750 to now just about 3,200.

I think it’s 3,250 now. As this increase in price has proceeded from late January, we have seen a corresponding fall of open interest in the amount of contracts open in the gold futures market from 600,000 to about 440,000 now. That is a huge fall in open interest concurrent with a rise in the gold price. That means in the most basic of terms, if positions are closing and the price is rising, that means a short squeeze. It doesn’t mean that everyone who’s buying back a short is buying because he’s being squeezed, but it means that the trend since late January is short squeeze in gold.

It’s not major, but it is happening and it is being sustained for the last four months, especially what I wanted to point out is the last six weeks from about mid-April, early to mid-April to now. Open interest has not moved much at all. It is pretty much stable at around 440,000 contracts. It says 438,000. This is the day behind. What I was saying earlier in the introduction to this video is that the action in gold right now is not happening in the futures market. We can know this because despite the enormous price changes, the daily swings in the gold price, open interest is not moving much at all.

If open interest is not moving much at all, despite the huge changes in the gold price, then it is not the futures market that is moving the gold price right now. That is what Daniel Oliver’s point was when he said the factors that are moving the gold price now are much different than they were in 2008, 2011, when it was mainly speculators from the US who operate on margin. Now it is sovereign wealth funds and central banks and those that do not operate on margins. They don’t get margin calls. Just to note what is happening in the COMEX while not much action is happening in the futures market, there’s a lot happening in the physical stocks at the COMEX in the vaults.

We can see here that the gold supplies in New York have reversed from about 45 million ounces to now 39 million. That is about 6 million ounces in like four weeks or so. You can see from here, this is the sharpest decline in gold supplies that has pretty much ever happened in the COMEX in terms of rate. I’m not saying it means much just yet, but it is happening. What is curious is that it’s not happening in silver. You can see the silver supplies continue to rise. They stopped very briefly for a few days and now they continue to rise.

They’re up to 504 million point 72 ounces. Sorry, 504.72 million ounces, an all time record high. Silver flows have not reversed back out from New York yet. So something different is happening in gold than silver, which is reflective in the fact that the metals are not trading together as they usually do. Close this out. What I want to say is that the main action in gold right now is not in the futures market. The futures market is dead in the water. Open interest is not changing much and we have a very rare instance of open interest rising slightly.

Actually the most I think it has ever risen on a triple digit move like this down $110 or whatever it was yesterday. We are on a ship. The waves are getting intense. The lighthouse is not moving. It’s the dollar that’s having a malarial fever of hot and cold and hot and cold and in the end it will sink to the bottom of the ocean. Since paper cannot survive at the bottom of an ocean it will just disintegrate and that’ll be the end of it. This is Rafi the end game investor and I’ll see you guys on Thursday for the silver report.

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