this is from ed steer of casey research:

Ted Butler had this to say about it yesterday..."While I certainly didn't expect it, explaining Monday's sell-off is pretty easy. It was a dealer-engineered drop to get recent Non-Commercial longs to liquidate...and those Non-Commercial shorts who covered in the past week and a half, to reinstate their short positions. I think today's COT will show a deterioration, or increase in the dealer net short position of 20 to 25,000 in gold and 2 or 3000 in silver. Today's action reverses that. It's really quite bullish, but it does feel like crap."

Ted mentioned the COT, which came out on Monday (instead of Friday) because of Thanksgiving. This report was for positions held as of November 25th. In gold, it showed precisely what he said it would on this $83 price rise. The tech funds went long 3,951 contracts and covered 13,092 shorts...as the two U.S. bullion banks went short 14,779 contracts and sold 7,340 long positions...for a net deterioration of 22,119 contracts! In the Nonreportable (small trader) category, the traders sold 1,091 longs, but covered 6,167 shorts. This was a rally that was engineered to fail..."same old, same old"...as JPMorgan went short against all comers. And as Butler said, "Monday's action reverses all that"...which it probably did.

The surprise (for both Ted and I) was in silver. We were both expecting deterioration after the big price rise off the bottom, but we got an improvement instead...mainly because of big liquidation in the 'long silver/short gold' trading position. The current silver COT report is beyond wildly bullish...and will have improved further after the huge price drop yesterday. Ted will have more to say about 'all of the above' in his latest commentary due out later today.

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