yesterday's wild swings in the silver price may have been due to options expiry, according to ed steer.

http://caseyresearch.com/displayDrp....

Gold didn't do much in Far East and European trading yesterday. The real action came the moment that the London p.m. fix was in at 10:00 a.m. New York time. The dealers pulled their bids and 'presto'...gold was down $25. Silver followed a slightly different path. Just before the London p.m. gold fix, silver had a big spike to the upside before it too succumbed to the same not-for-profit seller(s)...an 81 cent move from the top to the bottom. As was (correctly) pointed out by UBS gold analyst John Reade...yesterday was options expiry on the Comex and the boys were doing everything that they usually do around this time of month to make sure a lot of those call options they'd written since August's option expiry finished out of the money...and the bullion bank(s) gets to keep all those lovely premiums. Mission accomplished!

Yesterday morning I got an e-mail from Bart Chilton, one of the nicer commissioners over at the CFTC...informing me that the enforcement division (rather than the oversight division) of the CFTC was going to be investigating the silver market. My e-mail back to him was right to the point..."Bart, the first place your boys can look is the price moves around the London p.m. fix today. Whoever was behind those shenanigans should be able to tell you a lot."