COMEX Warehouse Stocks April 20, 2010

SILVER

140,170 ozs withdrawn from the dealer’s (registered) inventory
158,202 ozs withdrawn from the customer (eligible) inventory
Total dealer inventory 50.20 Mozs
Total customer inventory 64.43 Mozs
Combined Total 114.63 Mozs

GOLD

31,770 ozs withdrawn from the dealers (registered) category
611 ozs deposited in the customer (eligible) category
Total dealer inventory 2.42 Mozs
Total customer inventory 7.68 Mozs
Combined Total 10.10 Mozs

There were no major movements in gold. There were sizeable withdrawals of silver from both the customer and dealer inventories. However, what is even more remarkable is that there was an internal transfer from the customer inventory to the dealer inventory of 1.48 Mozs which has taken the dealer inventory back up to 50 Mozs. This is still a paltry amount. Why was this transfer suddenly effected? We are seeing many things in the silver market which all together are adding up to there being a lot of growing stress. I am hearing of delays in deliveries of even just a few bars from the Comex. The Comex silver futures have been have been showing different behavior that in the past.

There were 24 delivery notices issued in the APR gold contract. The APR gold contract total for the month is 13,124 notices or 1,312,400 ozs.

There were no delivery notices issued in the APR silver contract. The total delivery notices for the month in silver stand at 469 or 2.34 Mozs.

Silver contango is 0.6 cents APR/MAY while for APR/JUN contracts it is 2.1 cents. There is $0.0 of contango in gold APR/MAY and $0.4 of contango for APR/JUN.

The Open Interest in the APR gold contract is 368 or 0.04 Million ozs. Along with the already issued delivery notices the gold demand in April could be 1.35 Mozs or 56% of the dealer inventory! There is still no indication of any sizeable movement out of the inventory yet.

There appears to be a lot of stress in the silver physical market. The open interest in the Comex May contract is 46,377 contracts. That is 231 Mozs. Of course a lot of these will be sold or rolled before the first notice day in just over a week but if 10% were to stand for delivery this would take almost 50% of the dealer inventory. This may well account for the sudden transfer of 1.5 Mozs from the customer inventory to the dealers. We will see how this evolves in the coming days.
Cheers
Adrian