Silver "Trades" At $13 As Metals Hammered Hard (Maybe Hammered For This Specific Reason)

Gold and silver have come under heavy pressure since 8:00 a.m. EST. There could be a very specific reason for that. Here are the details...

Update:

Silver has just put in a "last" price with a 13-handle:

Zooming out a bit we can see the December 2015 lows are not that far off:

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There has been very heavy selling pressure since 8:00 a.m. EST.

Here's what the waterfall looks like:

Notice the spike in volume.

Here's a close up of the trading volume:

From around 8:00 a.m. until 8:50 a.m., roughly 40,000 contracts of gold were "bought" and "sold" in the "market". As a reminder, the markets don't even officially open until 9:30 a.m. EST, and there is no real data dump of any significance this morning.

It's just sheer precious metals price suppression.

The 40,000 contracts of gold represents 4,000,000 ounces, with a notional value of (call it $1195 gold) $4,780,000/000.

Silver is getting hammered too, and is a at risk, once again, of losing $14.

We can see the metals over the last ten days:

And we can see that while silver has not yet put in a new, lower-low, but silver is awfully close.

Today is COT Reporting day, so it is prime time for cartel shenanigans in order to confuse, obfuscate and distort the Report. Remember, while the Commitment of Traders is reported on Tuesday, the data isn't released until Friday. The way the reporting and the waiting period works only works to the cartel's advantage.

As for the dollar, well, the dollar is pretty much in its range-bound position it has been in for weeks:

So it is not like the dollar is just all of the sudden surging to new highs.

Nope.

It's just plain old market manipulation.

Which might show us a 13-handle in silver.

If you haven't already, check out the SD Outlook from yesterday. A central topic was about what impact a false flag attack, either staged, hoaxed, or real, or a real terrorist attack, might have on markets, and just now, we are learning that the filming for a staged false flag chemical attack in Syria has begun.

Therefore, there is at least one speculative reason, fundamental in nature, for this smash.

The reason is if there is some sort of false flag in Syria, and things actually get more serious than simply launching 103 missiles on three Syrian targets on a Friday evening, and having it all over by Saturday, well, we can see that with the rising tensions and escalating "conflict" in the Middle East, there would be a move into gold & silver.

Said differently, who would want to move in to the dollar at that point? Certainly not the countries involved in this conflict such as Iran, Syria, Russia, possibly China, and other countries that would bear the brunt of a US military or economic sanction response, or, in a worst case scenario, both military strikes and sanctions?

And new military strikes could bring with them even more death and destruction than the last time. Recall that just yesterday, National Security Advisor John Bolton, Deep State Swamp Creature and War Monger Extraordinaire, said the response to Assad's use of chemical weapons will be much stronger than last time.

As such, if the is a flight to safety and a flight to quality in gold & silver, the cartel would want the metals starting from the lowest price possible, so any move into gold & silver go largely un-noticed.

In other words, a $.90 move in silver from here wouldn't even see the white metal over $15.

Stack accordingly...

- Half Dollar

About the Author U.S. Army Iraq War Combat Veteran Paul "Half Dollar" Eberhart has an AS in Information Systems and Security from Western Technical College and a BA in Spanish from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Paul dived into gold & silver in 2009 as a natural progression from the prepper community. He is self-studied in the field of economics, an active amateur trader, and a Silver Bug at heart. Paul's free book Gold & Silver 2.0: Tales from the Crypto can be found in the usual places like Amazon, Apple iBooks & Google Play, or online at PaulEberhart.com. Paul's Twitter is @Paul_Eberhart.

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