Some things never seem to change. One of them is The Gold Cartel is not going to go away until they blow up. And until that occurs, we will constantly be infuriated, with today being one of those days. Part of that constant aggravation is they are SO obvious with their price suppression maneuvers and no one comments on their repetitive drills outside of the GATA camp.

You have to be brain dead if you watch how gold and silver trade and not notice how they operate. We have made a special point over the years to highlight their attacking the price following the PM Fix, which is their PLAN B selling drill. Over the past many weeks they have been particularly aggressive, selling on Fridays once the physical market pricing concluded for the week. We have been pounding the table on this one. Yesterday I had thought, due to probabilities, we might be due for a change, at least for one Friday.

Wrong. The PM Fix today was $1738.25. Gold had been all over the place prior to the Fix, falling from yesterday’s afternoon highs back to $1728. However, it was surging around PM Fix time due to the strength in the cash markets. But, after the Fix concluded, The Gold Cartel began their Friday attack yet again, dropping the price $10 and back to its lows. There was NO outside market action to account for the price drop. Gold then steadied up for the rest of the Comex trading session, but only managed a Comex close slightly above key $1730 resistance.

The bad news is The Gold Cartel will be around for some time. The good news is with the physical markets as strong as they are, the best they can do is remain in managed retreat mode. Attack and back off … attack and back off. Clearly they did have an agenda to bury the price of gold before the election. It was no fluke that gold popped like it did on election day when it was too late to affect markets. Only the most naïve could fail to appreciate what occurred, either that or coincidences have become the "new norm" in markets rather than the exception.

While The Gold Cartel is still very visible, it is just as visible how they have their hands full at the moment…

*On the week gold rallied nearly $60 with the dollar on the upside and the DOW under considerable pressure.

*We have seen how resilient the market is on Gold Cartel attacks. The price kept coming back this week following their raids.

*The fundamentals could not be more constructive. The reasons to own gold could not be clearer. Investors are responding to the obvious.

Silver led the way up early yesterday and did so again today after a quick early drubbing. After going back to check that key $32 area, silver turned around following a $32.04 print on the downside and took off, rising all the way to $32.79, breaking through the next pivotal level at $32.50 in the process. When gold was taken to task after the PM Fix, silver fell back to the $32.50 area. It held and silver began to move right back up.

The gold open interest rose 2264 contracts to 452,667, as the specs jump back in. The real stunner was the silver open interest. It rose a whopping 3809 contracts to 141,625, which means it is not far removed from its recent highs. Over the past weeks Rocket Rich has articulated a constructive case for the continued high open interest in silver. That the strong silver hands are not getting shaken out this time, and that if silver can zoom through $35 on the upside, it could lead to a Commercial Signal Failure, one which would cause panic shortcovering among a number of shorts.

RR on the silver OI:

Oh my, Oh my,..

OI up a monster 3,809 yesterday to 141,625!..

We haven't see a daily move like that for months and it now leaves OI only some 1,500 Contracts from multi-month highs!..

History would suggest that with the OI now comfortably over the 140,000, the Shorts are going to get little further support from their greatest sponsor, The Commercials, if the price starts to head higher from here!..

Oh my, oh my,..

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The new Sprott PSLV offering to buy up physical silver could not come at a better time for us and a worse time for JPM.