The HUI was biased a little to the upside today. Ten stocks up and 6 down. I thought the HUI had 15 stocks. Whatever. Six of the ten up stocks were up 1 percent or a little more. All red stocks registered less than one percent down. Looks like the black boxes slipped a gear and were stuck in neutral.

Volume was down quite a bit in the two big PM ETF's today, whatever that might foretell. GLD was down some 33%, trading 14.2 million shares today, 21.5 yesterday. SLV 10.8 million vs. 13.4.

GLD was up.78 cents while SLV lost a penny. Nevertheless, about a billion and a half bucks changed hands today just with GLD. That, to me, is a lot of fiat, some or all of which might have gone to the mining shares not that many years ago.

If one of the reasons for the creation of these big PM ETFs was to siphon cash and interest away from the PM miners, big and small, they've probably succeeded more than they thought.