this is from ed steer of casey research:

Silver was a big surprise...as it's been all week. Despite being down big almost every day...it has always bounced back by the end of Comex trading. It would have probably finished in positive territory [like platinum and palladium did] if it hadn't been stopped in its tracks once electronic trading began. And to see silver come back from three amazingly similar Comex sell-offs and then close three days running within a ten cent price band...just reeks to high heaven of price management.

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Open interest for Wednesday's trading activity in both gold and silver is as follows....gold o.i. fell 3,534 contracts to 365,084, of which roughly 1,400 were deliveries. Silver o.i. fell a respectable 933 contracts to 93,573. Trading volume wasn't overly heavy in either metal that day. One would think that [after the deliberate take-down in the price of both gold and silver yesterday] we should see fairly substantial declines in open interest when the numbers become available later this morning.

I want to remind you of what I said on Saturday about Friday's Commitment of Traders report. I said that it was bullish for silver and bearish for gold. Since then, I'd say that it's even more bullish for silver and somewhat less bearish for gold. No doubt there was some reasonably serious spec long liquidation yesterday, as we made new lows [on big volume] for this move in both silver and gold. Ted Butler mentioned to me that if the bullion banks wish to, they can still take gold down below its 200-day moving average, as they could easily force the speculators to puke up some 80,000 long contracts. Neither of us want to think seriously about that possibility...but if it does come to pass, then you'll know why it happened, how it happened...and who did it. The new COT report will be out at 3:30 Eastern time today.

In other gold and silver news, there were only 206 contracts delivered in gold yesterday...and nothing in silver. Nothing was added to either GLD or SLV as far as I could tell. And over at the U.S. Mint, I see that the month has started off rather modestly with 2,500 gold eagles minted and 43,000 silver eagles. After the torrid pace of the first three months of this year, I would not be entirely surprised if mintings dropped off a bit in April. Over at the Comex-authorized gold and silver warehouses, I see that silver stocks took another large drop on Thursday...this time by 2,150,049 ounces. Between yesterday and Wednesday, almost four million ounces of silver has been shipped out of the Comex. Comex silver inventories are now at their lowest level in a couple of years.

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