If there is a silver shortage as listed below in the article, if silver ever becomes a focal point for the people, it will jump higher that the farthest reaches of space in value. This would happen if the people wanted to hold the physical silver in their hands as their tangible property. Gold and Bitcoin would die... at least for a while.
The silver short squeeze is glaringly obvious to anyone paying attention to the data, the evidence is overwhelming, just take a look for yourself, PSLVFirst off, if you are long GME this is not a post to tell you to sell GME.
GME sequence of events (yes the game was rigged we retail traders got screwed):
GME is way over shorted > brokers allowed this > squeeze happens, hedge fund lose tons of money and face insolvency > Citadel gives $3 billion to Melvin Capital, despite the fact they are supposed to be a neutral market maker > price keeps surging > Melvin faces insolvency and will lose Citadel's investment, Citadel is no longer a neutral player > clearinghouses get leaned on by powerful suits to raise margin requirements on GME > brokers will have to make up the losses of the shorts they allowed to occur > they decide to save their own skin at the expense of their clients and rig the trade > instead of going to thousands per share as IBKR ceo admitted it would have, retail is robbed of billions in gains
Now on to the silver post
This is a very long post, so I apologize to the WSB apes who can barely read and will have to scroll a long way to get to the TLDR. Its also been impossible to post about silver lately on WSB (no posts approved, thanks to the mod who assisted this one), so I crammed about 3-4 posts worth into this one. Not sure when I'll be allowed to post again.
I've organized this post into 4 sections so feel free to skip around to the parts you are interested in.
1. The silver short squeeze evidence
2. Why the 'hedge funds are pushing silver' narrative is BS
3. The fundamental case for silver, and why the shorts deserve to be squeezed
4. TLDR, what to buy if you want to go long silver
Since my initial post on the potential for a silver short squeeze, I have been researching the topic to prepare a more detailed and substantiated update post. This is my latest attempt to post, and hopefully this one gets to stay up (silver censorship has been a thing here lately)
1. The potential for a short squeeze (573% of the 'float' is currently sold short)
The big thing to remember here is that if enough market participants who are long silver contracts in the futures market begin to demand delivery of their silver, there will absolutely be a meltup in the price because there simply isn't enough supply available.
The next 3 trading days are critical, and there is war being waged. The shorts and COMEX are in a fight for their lives, and barely hanging on by a thread
Many big name precious metals veterans have bemoaned for years about how the size of the 'paper' silver market absolutely dwarfs the amount of silver that could be delivered, and thus the market is manipulated. The vast majority of futures and options contracts in the silver market have historically been settled via cash. Meaning no physical silver is actually delivered when these contracts are set to expire. This is where the talk of the 100-1 and 250-1 paper silver to physical silver ratios comes from, but short interest is actually more like 6-1 on the COMEX using open interest data through the next two big delivery months.
Technically every month is eligible for deliveries, but only months with options interest tend to have any real volume, and that's why they are known as delivery months. March and May are options expiration months, while April is not.
If you want to think about it like a stock, the short interest is 573% of the 'float'. This is based on the fact that over the next 3 months there are futures contracts and options which have the right to take delivery of 847 million ounces of silver. This is compared to only 147 million ounces registered on the COMEX that could fulfil these deliveries. For perspective, GME short interest peaked at around 140% of its float, and that was considered crazy high. It is widely known that if a small, but significant share of long silver contract holders took delivery, that there would not be enough silver, as the demand would cascade higher and higher as the prices rise.
(sources: silver stocks report, futures open interest, options open interest, data as of 2-18 was used in this post)
This would be similar to a bank run scenario. The COMEX is the silver bank, and they have printed too many paper claims on a limited amount of silver. If there is no actual silver left to be delivered to the holders of the futures contracts, that means that means that the COMEX would default and settle their contracts in cash. No one wants to get settled in cash if the COMEX had to default. This would mean that right as you want to be able to stay long silver, as the price is surging higher, that you will get forced out and paid cash instead of silver and wouldn't benefit from future increases in the price. The traders who want to stay long silver and who see the run occurring would try to take delivery because if you actually have physical silver in your vault then it doesn't matter if the COMEX goes down, you still have your actual silver you can sell on the spot market. Most importantly to them, they get to keep participating in the upside.
Now the shorts are very much trying to keep the price down at the moment, because their problems get worse as the price rises and more options become in the money. See the chart below, with a handy arrow to illustrate where we are currently in terms of March open interest.
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There is another asset that has been in the news recently that is over 55k in price (WSB bans mentioning it, I'm not trying to pump it, just use it for an example). There are only ~21 million of these items that will ever be mined, and they are valued for their scarcity and deflationary tendency. For every ten of these things which shall not be named there is only one 1000oz commercial silver bar, and each bar costs roughly half of what 1 of the things that shall not be named costs.
