this is from ed steer of casey research on the recent trading in silver and gold:

Despite the fact that both gold and silver got it in the neck on Tuesday, open interest numbers for that day's trading were underwhelming. Gold open interest only fell 2,071 contracts to 365,271...and silver's o.i actually rose 15 contracts to 93,051. Hopefully these figures will be in the Commitment of Traders tomorrow. In another long conversation with Ted Butler, he feels that the tech funds in silver have pretty much been cleaned out...even though the price didn't get anywhere near the 50-day moving average...and that gold had a long way to go to achieve the same position that silver is now in. Yesterday's low in gold for the April contract was $900.40...with the 50-day m.a. at $895.93...less than five bucks away. The gold price would have to be dropped to about $880-885 [or a bit lower] to clean out the majority of the tech longs in the Non-Commercial category. Will that happen? One way or another, it's my bet that we'll find out what JPMorgan et al have in store for us sometime during the next 48 hours.

click to enlarge

There were 111 contracts delivered in Comex gold yesterday. JPMorgan was the biggest issuer [77 contracts] and also the biggest stopper [97 contracts]. So far in March, 1,061 contracts in gold have been delivered...which is quite a bit for a non-delivery month. In silver, 261 contracts were delivered. The big issuers were Bank of N.S. [120] and JPMorgan [126]...with the biggest stoppers being JPMorgan [116] and Goldman Sachs [106]. Comex warehouse silver stocks rose a hair under one million ounces. The U.S. Mint has reported production for part of the first week of March. So far they've punched out 26,000 one troy ounce gold eagles and 541,500 silver eagles. There were no changes in either GLD or SLV inventories.

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