A person buys a contract from Comex for silver delivery.
The contract numbers are for 5,000 physical ounces of silver.
It is a “futures” contract, and silver contracts mature at Comex every 2 months.
Now the contract must either be exercised, sold, or rolled over to a later future month. This all has to happen on the day the contracts go “off the board” which is typically about a week before the first day of the month the contract matures.
Now, if on or before that day when they go off the board, a contract holder can come up with the total cost of his contract and plunk it down at Comex and demand delivery.
For 5000 ounces at around 30 an ounce, that amounts to about 150K
If the price of silver is rising rapidly, then it would seem to pay to actually take delivery. You know it and Comex knows it.
So they might try to talk you out of it in a way. They want you to roll over your contract to a later month, and will give you some goodies to do it.
Or they might just as well buy your contract outright, that way you are happy, and they don’t have to give you the physical metal.
That is what we are talking about here. People hold contracts, possibly at a much lower price than spot currently is, and Comex decided to pay them 80% over the spot price to satisfy the contract.
Alot of folks who watch things are expressing much doubt about this report.
I’m kinda on the fence...
Shouldn’t this be fairly simple to verify by looking at the books? How can COMEX be hiding how many contracts they are buying/selling and at what premium? I don’t doubt that the do have a mechanism to hide it, but I’d think this one would be fairly simple to discover.
So we are told ...