ed steer comments on the trading from last friday and yesterday. of course today silver is up over $15/oz but you'd never know that from the mining shares:

Friday's big spike in both gold and silver produced monstrous increases in open interest in both precious metals. Gold o.i. increased a knee-wobbling 17,792 contracts to 393,013... on big volume of 104,330. This o.i. number exceeding even my wildest guess. Silver was just as outrageous, with o.i. rising 4,453 contracts to 104,810... on volume of 50,819. So you can see that the New York bullion banks really had to pour in on the short side to kill Friday's rally. But you knew that already.

You will also notice that the bullion banks tried to get everything back on Monday that they were forced to give up on Friday... which they attempted to do by engineering this sell-off. This isn't the first time this has happened either. Open interest for Monday will be available in a few hours. It will be an improvement... as there was short-covering yesterday... but not 18,000 contracts worth. The dealer net short position is now even worse than what I estimated on Saturday.

There's always an outside chance that this net short position hole that the bullion banks are digging themselves, could turn into a grave if they get overrun. And there's a story towards the end of this column that suggests that that possibility took a giant step forward yesterday.

http://www.caseyresearch.com/displayGsd.php