If the Comex were allowed to issue paper contracts representing no more that 10 or 20% of the actual amount of gold held by Comex vaults, what would the price of gold be?
1.176 million ounces of gold have been delivered – or should I say “delivered” – for the June contract six days into the June contract delivery period. I don’t follow the delivery patterns as closely as I used to, but this is a massive amount of stated deliveries. Even more interesting is the fact that there’s still 6,683 Juno contracts open representing 668,300 ozs of potential deliveries. This is a relatively high number of contracts still open this far into the delivery period.
One other interesting point of note is that over the last few months, a couple new “players,” beyond the standard Comex bullion banks (JP Morgan, HSBC, Scotia) have been participating in the deliveries: B of A (Merrill), International FCStone Financial, Morgan Stanley and SocGen. All four of these have been taking an increasing amount of deliveries the past couple of months, primarily on behalf of customers (vs. for their own house account).
I have no idea what would be triggering this sudden increase in delivery activity on the Comex – other than the obvious. And who knows to what extent the physical gold is actually being moved from the accounts of the delivering parties to segregated accounts of the parties taking delivery. It would be even more interesting if a lot of this gold was being removed from the Comex, which would reinforce the likelihood that it really exists in unencumbered physical form.
On another note, the stock portfolio portion of the fund I co-manage was up 4.7% today vs. the HUI up .23% and the VanEck Vectors Junior Gold Miners (NYSE:GDXJ) “junior” ETF up 1.7%. We own highly concentrated positions in true junior exploration stocks. My point here is that a lot of money is flowing into the highest risk/return segment of the mining stock sector. In my opinion this is a signal that the “smart” money is expecting a big move in the entire sector.