➡ Raf from the Endgame Investor discusses the unpredictable nature of gold and silver prices, the impact of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz on oil prices, and the influence of the US dollar. He advises ignoring mainstream and social media, instead focusing on market prices and real-world events. He also notes a significant decrease in speculators in the gold futures market, which could lead to drastic changes in gold prices when conditions change. Lastly, he discusses Silver 47, a company he believes will benefit from the re-monetization of gold and silver.
➡ The market is ripe for speculators to drive prices up due to low open interest numbers, similar to the gold market in 2015. Japan’s economy is at risk due to its reliance on oil from the Strait of Hormuz, which is currently closed. This could also impact the Western monetary system as Japan plays a key role. The value of the yen and other currencies could be affected by rising interest rates and the potential for a debt collapse in Europe due to oil supply issues. The value of gold and housing in the US is also fluctuating due to these global economic factors.

Are you crazy? Don’t go between them! Go between them? Are you crazy? I said go around! You said go between them! I said don’t go between them! Hey guys, Raf here from the Endgame Investor and the world has gone even madder than it has been. Hey guys, Raf here from the Endgame Investor and the world has gone mad. What else is new? Gold and silver are going up 5%, down 5%, up 7%, down 7%. The monetary system, as we have known it since 1971, is coming apart. Interest rates are spiking all over the western world.

And nobody knows what’s even going on on a basic level in terms of facts on the ground. That’s because nobody ever trusted the mainstream media, especially not since COVID and long before that. And so they turned to social media, which isn’t trustworthy either because any AI can come up with an algorithm and feed you whatever narrative it wants you to believe for whatever commercial or marketing purposes anyone behind it may have. Trump says one day the United States is winning the war. Trump says the next day that Iran is great negotiator and it looks like the Strait of Hormuz is still closed.

And my advice on the Endgame Investor on sub-stack, I don’t give advice, but my non-financial advice in air quotes is basically to ignore what anyone says, whether on the mainstream media or social media and just watch market prices and whether traffic is actually going through Hormuz, which at this point it is not. And so as I see it, there are two options from here. Either the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, oil prices continue to rise, and as oil can only be bought in US dollars, companies and other actors need more and more US dollars to buy the same amount of oil.

And so the dollar spikes and the dollar prices of other things fall, including gold and silver that is until some big bank gets in trouble and the Fed has to print a bunch of money and gold and silver reverse and go vertical or everything else stays kind of stable in dollar terms or even falls. This would be the Endgame. The other option is that the Straits of Hormuz open and gold and silver rise oil falls until there is an Endgame anyway. So once again, the end is always the same, but the path to it is slightly different.

But one thing has changed significantly and that is the amount of speculators on the gold futures market. The amount of open interest on the gold futures market is now below 400,000, significantly below 400,000 for the first time since the 2008 financial crisis. That means there are no more speculators in gold and silver prices and we are nowhere near anything like the bear market bottom of 2014, 2013 when open interest was near these levels. That doesn’t mean that the gold price is going to change immediately, but that means when it does, it’s going to change very, very drastically because there are no speculators in the market and they tend to follow trends.

And when the term of the trend is back up, whether that be because the Fed is printing again or because the Straits of Hormuz opens again, the momentum is going to be extreme in my view. And so I have eight slides for you today. This video is brought to you by Silver 47, symbol AGA in Canada, symbol AAGAF in the US. The main thesis behind companies like these gold and silver exploration companies is that when gold and silver get re monetized and we are on the verge of that, we’re just waiting for one more printing round, then big players are going to be very interested in the project that these companies are developing.

So they move from exploration to production a lot faster when bigger companies become interested in what they are up to. So Silver 47, who is interested in this stock right now and to what degree? Well, you have the capital structure of Silver 47, a $138 million market cap with an 8% investment, 8% ownership by Eric Sprott, the miner that everybody knows, the mining guy, 19% by institutional and strategic partners and 10% by management and insiders and the other 63% by retail. Silver 47 has $53 million in cash to expand its drilling program with no debt to speak of.

The reason I own Silver 47 is that I am looking for a small number of companies that will develop or could develop into primary silver producers, primarily in the United States because so little of today’s silver production is by primary silver miners. Most of it is secondary, but they’re going to need primary silver miners to produce more silver in the years ahead since credit won’t be very good for the next decade or so. And in that time, I believe that gold and silver primary producers, especially silver primary producers are going to capitalize on this reality.

So let’s start with a chart that I’ve never shown on any of these videos before. And that is the amount of physical gold cover on the COMEX. I hear a lot of people talking about how there was fractional reserve on the COMEX, that there are more notional gold ounces being traded than gold backing. And though that is true, it is not nearly as true as people want to believe. There is actually heavy backing on the COMEX. The amount of notional gold that is traded is almost equal to the amount of gold that actually exists in the COMEX vaults.

It is not one to one, but it was one to one at one point last year. And I will show you that in the next slide, but you see here, this is the ratio of coverage. The higher it is, the less gold they have. And the more paper is traded relative to that amount of gold. So you can see here in 2001 around gold’s bottom, we were at 15 to one, the amount of notional gold that traded was about 15 times the amount of physical gold that existed in the COMEX vaults.

But that number came down in 2006. And it really crashed at 2020 when there was a huge importation of gold into the COMEX vaults. And we can see that number keeps trending lower and lower. It trended much lower in 2025, the beginning of 2025. And now it is between one and two. If we zoom in on the chart, next one we see at the beginning of 2025, there was a 100% gold coverage. The amount of notional gold traded was exactly equal to the amount of physical gold that existed in the vaults.

So that here in the differential, which was zero, and in the percentage cover, which was 100% over here. And you can see the ratio of coverage was one in early 2025. We’re not there right now. We’re at 1.26. So that means there’s about 26% more notional gold being traded than the amount of physical gold that exists in the vaults. So while it is still a fractional reserve system, and that is unjust, it is not nearly as fractional as people want to believe that it is. Am I defending COMEX? No, I’m not.

But I am saying that those who say that the whole thing is going to crash because there is a huge amount of paper and that traders dump paper in order to suppress the price of gold. It’s not exactly true, not really in that way. It is the entire system of gold trading for futures for dollars that is the problem. And that is what will come to an end, not because any of these numbers are going to be out of control because no one’s going to trust paper at all anymore. And so the amount of coverage is not really going to be indicative of the gold or silver price.

And this really is an indicator that you should pretty much ignore, not completely, but it is not worth as much as people might want you to believe that it is. And now here, I want to get into something that’s a little bit more important. And that is that gold open interest has dropped below 400,000 contracts with more room to fall. This is the first time this has happened since the 2008 financial crisis. We’re at 391,339 with a drop of 14,665 contracts yesterday. And you can see what’s happening here in the tables.

These are the different expirations, March, April, May, and June. We’re seeing a rollover from April to June. April is the next active contract. And June is the contract, active contract after that. There are 40,000 contracts, over 40,000 contracts that closed in April and only 25,000 that open in June. That means that those who are open in April, those who have contracts for April delivery, they are not rolling over into June, at least not all of them. So what this means is that open interest is likely going to fall further into April, moving from March to April, April being the next active contract and a bunch of deliveries are going to be due then.

And what does low open interest mean? It means that speculators are no longer speculating on these contracts. So when the conditions do change, there is going to be a huge amount of room for speculators to go into this market and bid the price a lot higher. The fact that we’ve only fallen from about 5,600 to about 4,400, and we haven’t gotten much lower than that, means that on the next momentum, we’re going to head pretty high. How high exactly, I don’t know, is going to be the ending. It could be. But if we look here historically, we can see where we are in the open interest.

I drew this by the pixel. I zoomed in here where this is about 390,000. Last time we hit below these numbers was right at the beginning of 2015 or so, which was the bear market bottom for the gold market. But keep in mind that we were only hitting these open interest numbers years after the high was printed. At this point, the high and gold was printed on January 29th. We were only two months out from there. And we’re already at these extremely low open interest numbers. The downward momentum in price is pretty much exhausted.

We could get a little bit lower than this, but it’s not going to be that much. And if we do get lower, it’s not going to be sustainable, judging by the amount of speculators that are in this market, which is very, very low right now. I wanted to go into interest rates. We can see here that as the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, Japan is the primary victim here, because 90% of its oil comes through the Strait of Hormuz. If they get cut off from that supply, the country could dissolve or collapse.

And that’s not my words. That is in the words of Sanayata Kaichi, who said that there is some existential danger to Japan’s existence. If it doesn’t get the amount of oil that it needs right now, it’s not. So they have some reserves. They’re burning through them. We’ll see what happens. We can see here that interest rates, the 10-year, which is mostly the yen, because the yen is backed by like 90% 10-year Japanese government bonds. We are at the final resistance here. That’s this tiny candle during the Asian financial crisis over here, or the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis of 1998.

This is the last resistance over here. And from there, we go into technical outer space in Japanese government bonds. And that is going to pretty much upset the entire Western fiat monetary system, because Japan is a main fulcrum of that system, given that the Japanese carry trade or the yen carry trade supports a lot of the current dollar’s value. Now, if we look at the yen, it’s a very similar chart. A lot of Keynesians tend to think that the higher interest rates go, the stronger a currency becomes. It is not that case.

That is not the case with the currency that is backed mostly by its own bonds, which is the case with the yen. We see the yen is nearing its 37-36 year low over here from 1990. The yen is not being supported by higher interest rates at all. It is actually being weakened, which makes a lot of sense, because the yen is Japanese government bonds, because that’s what the Bank of Japan owns. So this year, we’re bordering on 160. That is the 1990 support zone. After that, we are back in outer space for the yen too.

So if the Bank of Japan hikes rates, the yen gets destroyed anyway, and that is where we are headed. The UK 10-year yield is back above 5%. I wanted to point out here that the UK, which gets a lot of its oil through the straight-up removes as well, the 10-year UK guilt yield hit support over here at about 4.2 or 4.3 or whatever it was, and the war broke out. So it’s kind of interesting how support, technical support, lined up with the outbreak of the war, which gave it a fundamental reason to rise, because if they don’t have the energy that they need, then their currency is also weakened, and so their interest rates go higher.

So we are at the upper end of this triangle right now, and we’ll see if we break out here. Remember this in 2022, that was the LDI, was it called? It was some leverage scheme that led to a breakdown in the bond market, and the Bank of England had to come in and manipulate the system a little bit or massage it. So we’re seeing here, we’re at the upper end of this channel here. If there’s a breakout, we could have a collapse in UK guilt, government bonds, guilts, whatever they’re called. We’re already about 5%.

There could be a waterfall decline here. It’s the same in almost every Western country, Germany, Italy, Spain, they’re all headed higher. All of Europe appears to be on the verge of a debt collapse, because most of its oil, or much of its oil, goes through her moose, and they are not getting it right now. The median price of a house in the US falls to 76 ounces. I was surprised about this, because gold is falling in price, but it’s not falling in price as fast as real estate right now. You can see here that you’re at 76 ounces of gold per house median US price.

The low in 1980 was 70, so even though gold is falling in price in dollars, housing is falling ever faster, and that has to do with interest rates rising as well. In the US, though we’re not near highs, we are going faster now. And since we are in a global fiat monetary system, currency is debt. When the value of debt falls, the value of currency falls with it. And so as I said in the beginning, we are in a binary situation here. Either the straits of our moose are going to be opened, or they are not.

Beyond that, what politicians say doesn’t really matter. Trump can say anything he wants. Either the straits are open, or they’re not. If they open, then gold will skyrocket back up, and oil will fall. If they are not open, then the price of oil will continue to rise. Gold could continue to fall from here, I don’t know, or if it will fall at all. We could be at a bottom already, given the open interest numbers, but it could fall further. And if it does, it will, until there is another financial crisis, which will force the Fed to print, which will bring the dollar value of gold way back up, and oil higher as well.

We will be at endgame one way or another, whether the straits open or not. It will come sooner if they don’t open. It will be a little bit more time if they do open. But whatever happens to them, gold still is money. The dollar is still credit, and the endgame is still coming. This is Rob in The Endgame Investor. Check the link in the description below to check out silver47 symbol AGA and Canada symbol AAGAF in the US, and I’ll see you guys next week. [tr:trw].

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