ed steer describes the metals markets as potentially explosive:

The gold and silver shares lost a little more ground again yesterday.

Changes in open interest are not as readily available now that this information is put out by the CME instead of the Comex. It has to be computed by hand, which is ridiculous. According to my friend Bill Murphy over at lemetropolecafe.com, Thursday gold o.i. fell 7,338 contracts to 470,834 contracts. Silver o.i. also fell, this time by 928 contracts to 124,387.

The Comex Delivery Report for Friday showed that 59 gold and 27 silver contracts were delivered. It should be no surprise to anyone that neither the GLD or SLV ETFs showed any changes yesterday, even though they're both owed a king's ransom in physical metal.
Ted Butler has more to say about that below. There were no reported changes from the U.S. Mint... but over at the Comex-approved depositories, another 811,339 ounces of silver were withdrawn from inventories.

As for the Commitment of Traders... it was awful. In silver, '4 or less' bullion banks are now net short a monstrous 61,926 contracts! [And if the truth were known, these four traders are short way more than that.] These contracts represents 309.6 million ounces of silver... a hair under 50% of this year's world mining production in silver. The link to the full-colour COT chart for silver should give you the horrors, and the link is here.

In gold, it's just as bad, if not worse... and it certainly set a new record high net short position of 284,661 contracts, which is 28.5 million ounces of gold. This number should scare the bejesus out of you! The link to the equally ugly full-colour COT graph for gold is here.

I note that Ted Butler did his weekly interview with Eric King over at kingworldnews.com. He reports that the commercial short and speculative long positions in gold and silver have again reached record extremes. Butler also speculates that the silver exchange-traded fund [SLV] is being shorted by commodity exchange shorts, creating an explosively dangerous as well as fraudulent situation in the silver market. This is a must listen... and the link is here.

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