Silver spikes past US$30 as retail investors swarm biggest target
Eddie Spence and Jake Lloyd-Smith, Bloomberg News
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Silver broke above US$30 an ounce as the precious metal took center stage in the retail investor frenzy sweeping through markets.
Most-active futures jumped as much as 13 per cent to US$30.35 an ounce on the Comex, the highest in eight years. That followed a weekend buying binge that overwhelmed online sellers of silver coins and bars from the U.S. to Australia. BlackRock Inc.âs iShares Silver Trust, the largest exchange-traded product tracking the metal, recorded an unprecedented US$944 million net inflow on Friday.
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Silver broke above $30 an ounce as the precious metal took centre stage in the retail investor frenzy sweeping through markets.
The most active futures contracts jumped as much as 13 per cent to $30.35 an ounce on the Comex, the highest in eight years. That followed a weekend buying binge that overwhelmed online sellers of silver coins and bars from the US to Australia. BlackRock’s iShares Silver Trust (SLV), the largest exchange-traded product tracking the metal, recorded an unprecedented $944 million net inflow on Friday.
Like the buying stampede in GameStop and other small-cap stocks that has captivated the financial world in recent weeks, silver’s advance can be traced to Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum. One post last week declared the metal “THE BIGGEST SHORT IN THE WORLD” and encouraged traders to pile into the iShares trust as a way to stick it to big banks.
UPDATE: Reddit Users Going After Silver for ‘Biggest Short Squeeze in the World’
Earlier Update: Top bullion dealers are encountering shortages.
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A number of Reddit users on the popular r/WallStreetBets forum have said they are planning to launch a coordinated effort to target silver as their next short-squeeze target.
Posts encouraged individuals to use the IShares Silver Trust, the largest silver exchange-traded fund, and carry out what one user called the “BIGGEST SHORT SQUEEZE IN THE WORLD.”
“Silver Bullion Market is one of the most manipulated on earth. Any short squeeze in silver paper shorts would be EPIC,” a user on Reddit’s WallStreetBets wrote. “We know billion banks are manipulating gold and silver to cover real inflation. Both the industrial case and monetary case, debt printing has never been more favorable for the No. 1 inflation hedge Silver.”
(Bloomberg) A silver frenzy calmed on Friday as investors weigh whether a push by Reddit posters to create a short squeeze has legs.The entire market from miners’ shares to exchange-traded funds and even the physical metal has emerged as one of the latest targets of the r/wallstreetbets board now famous for fueling a short squeeze in Gamestop Corp. that sent its market value soaring. Posts encouraged people to pile into IShares Silver Trust, the largest silver exchange-traded fund, and one described it as “THE BIGGEST SHORT SQUEEZE IN THE WORLD”.“It is true that the combined efforts of those on the Reddit forums can dramatically influence the price of individual stocks, but if you compare the size of the entire silver market to the market cap of the individual companies that forums have recently targeted, we don’t see this as having potential to significantly move silver into a short squeeze scenario,” said John Feeney, business developme