The world’s foremost silver analyst Theodore Butler has done it again. He has elaborated another bullish factor so powerful it screams at us to buy silver. As you know, Mr. Butler is the supreme expert on futures trading in silver. The reason that this knowledge is so important is because the COMEX is the primary place where silver prices are set. Forget about China, the dollar, the economy or whatever reason the media reports. Billion dollar banks, hedge funds and computerized trading monolith’s set the price on the COMEX.
What Mr. Butler’s brilliant analysis has uncovered is extremely complex, so I’ve had to simplify it so I could understand it myself. Over the years, he has pointed to the technical hedge funds as the big buyers and sellers who move prices up and down. The big banks such as JPMorgan take the other side of these trades. These technical funds usually go long as prices rise and short as prices fall. They trade in and out of their positions based on price movements.
Over the past three years, a new type of hedge fund buyer has emerged. Mr. Butler calls them the core non-technical funds. They don’t trade, they buy and hold. From late 2013 to the summer of 2015 their long position grew to 40,000 futures contracts and more recently to 60,000 contracts. That’s 300 million ounces of silver in this core long position. These are longs who are holding and waiting for higher prices. They use futures as their silver investment vehicle because of the leverage available.
According to Mr. Butler, there are two other types of silver buyers, small traders and the other large reporting traders. Together, he estimates their total long position to be another 20,000 contracts on top of the 60,000 contracts just mentioned above. That makes a total of 400 million ounces held on a long term basis when adding up these three categories of permanent longs.
This post was published at Silverseek
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