Last night I was looking at the Gold chart and SLAM! It recovered in the end but its getting silly.
Today's $1.24 Billion Targeted Gold Slam Down Makes The Mainstream Press
For the first time in what may be ages, a phenomenon that has become near and dear to anyone who trades gold, and which at best elicits a casual smirk from those who observe it several times daily, we find that the WSJ has finally picked up on the topic of the endless daily gold slam down, where the seller in complete disregard for market disruption (because in a normal world one wants to sell any given lot without notifying the market that one is selling so as to get a good price on the next lot... but not in the gold market where the seller slams the bid with reckless abandon) ignores market depth and in a demonstration of nothing but brute price manipulation force, slams every bid down just to demoralize further buying. Naturally, that this simply provides buyers with a more depressed price than is "fair" is lost on the seller, but not on the buyers who promptly bid up the metal as attempt to demoralize buying end in failure after failure. Yet it is peculiar that today, for the first time, the intraday gold slam down has finally made the MSM. To wit: "The CME Group Inc.’s Comex division recorded an unusually large transaction of 7,500 gold futures during one minute of trading at 8:31 a.m. EDT. The sale took out blocks of bids as large as 84 contracts in one fell swoop and cut prices down to $1,648.80 a troy ounce. The overall transaction was worth more than $1.24 billion... Gold traders buzzed with speculation that the transaction was an input error — a so-called “fat finger” trade. “Or a Gold Finger as it might be known in the bullion market,” traders at Citi joked in a note to clients." Well, no. It wasn't.
Because if it was, by that logic the gold market falls prey to a fat finger every single day, often times 2 or 3 times a day. But because gold market participants have learned that complaining to the CFTC about this kind of manipulation has no impact, and because at the end of the day it merely provides a cheap reentry price, most have grown to love and anticipate these kinds of moves. In fact, we can only hope that the CFTC and SEC ignores this WSJ update, and lets the market keep on keeping on without changing anything. Because otherwise who will provide the depressed price levels that permit conversion of worthless paper into Fed-detested, undilutable barbarous tradition?
Whistleblower Exposes JP Morgan's Silver Manipulation Scheme
On March 23, 2010, GATA Director Adrian Douglas was contacted by a
whistleblower by the name of Andrew Maguire. Maguire is a metals trader
in London. He has been told first-hand by traders working for
JPMorganChase that JPMorganChase manipulates the precious metals
markets, and they have bragged to how they making money doing so.
CFTC Pulls Public Comments from JP Morgan Whistle-blower: “We Are Fearful of a Cascading Credit Event; Wide-Scale Market Collapse”
In the letter, the JP Morgan insider reveals that high level executives and traders at the bank are putting the investments and savings of thousands, if not millions, of hard working Americans at risk of complete wide-scale market collapse through their machinations and fraudulent practices. Moreover, he suggests that executives at his bank are fully aware of commodity manipulations in which the bank engages, as well as the risks posed by a European collapse, an event that, according to the whistle-blower, will lead to annihilation of investments within a matter of days. (letter in link above)
Metal$ are in the pits
There is no silver lining to the activities of JPMorgan Chase and HSBC in the precious-metals market here and in London, says a 40-year veteran of the metal pits.
The banks, which do the Federal Reserve's bidding in the metals markets, have long been the government's lead actors in keeping down the prices of gold and silver, according to a former Goldman Sachs trader working at the London Bullion Market Association.
Embry had this to say about the gold market: “I would dare say that the manipulation (of gold) today is perhaps more blatant and there is more of it than I’ve ever seen. They (the manipulators) don’t care anymore. You see these 3 o’clock in the morning precipitous drops.You see drops when the COMEX opens and when the London PM fix is in. There are always these times they attack, and no market that wasn’t being manipulated would trade with that regularity.I am of the mind that the paper guys have overplayed their hand and they have pushed the price too low. The people in the East, in particular, the Russians, the Chinese, etc., know perfectly well the situation. They are using this as a wonderful opportunity to take on more and more physical at what I would consider to be bargain prices.
