Banks and brokers made ~ $5 BILLION. While everyone else lost over ~ $10 TRILLION.
This was the BIGGEST manipulation ever.
Let me explain this in simple words.
COMEX settlement is based on a VWAP from 13:24 to 13:25 ET.
LBMA settlement happens at 12:00 UK time.
Most silver OTC contracts settle off the LBMA reference, and a lot of OTC expires into month end.
Now look at Jan 30.
LBMA silver benchmark settled at $103.19. COMEX benchmark a few hours later settled at $78.29.
That is a massive dislocation.
And metals crashed in isolation. Stocks, bonds, and other commodities were basically unaffected.
Anyone who understands markets knows this is logically wrong.
Now connect the dots.
On Friday, COMEX open interest dropped by ~8k contracts by end of day.
Using the LBMA vs COMEX differential as the reference, banks could extract ~ $1B gain on shorts by pushing COMEX through the floor AFTER LBMA settled.
But it gets worse.
$SLV kept trading after the LBMA benchmark settlement and printed almost a 20% discount to NAV.
Here's the trick.
AP banks could buy $SLV shares from panic sellers, tender the shares, claim bars at $103.19, and make a killing.
And the data lines up.
According to iShares, $SLV share count increased by ~51M shares from Thursday to Friday.
Because of the NAV discount, banks could extract up to ~ $1.5B exploiting the ETF if they bought that share increase and then turned around to claim bars at the higher settlement price.
Keep an eye on ETF redemptions.
Then you had the leveraged ETF layer.
Leveraged silver ETFs like $AGQ got forced into liquidating a huge amount of derivatives during the crash.
Brokers made a killing there too.
All in all, it's fair to estimate banks and brokers made up to ~ $5B in profits, or reduced losses, orchestrating one of the biggest one day silver manipulations in history.
And they likely made more if the same dynamic hit gold, platinum, and palladium too.
The world of anti-inflation and anti-currency-devaluation assets is vast, and it’s far from limited to gold and silver.
Of course, precious metals are excellent long-term bulwarks against the coming wave of negative real interest rates and inflation.
Gold will no doubt go much higher than $5,000 in a few years, and if you’re holding it physically without leverage, the current price movements won’t worry you all that much.
But don’t forget that alongside gold there’s oil, gas, coal, palm oil, iron ore, agricultural commodities, fertilizers.
And plenty of undervalued stocks in these sectors, still at the bottom of their cycles, unlike gold and silver mines.
You could even say that a good undervalued classic industrial small-to-mid cap deserves the label of anti-inflation asset too.
At current prices, I feel far more at ease buying oil companies than gold mines. The oil companies / gold mines ratio is at its HISTORICAL lows.
🚨OVER $12 TRILLION WAS ERASED FROM GLOBAL MARKETS IN JUST 48 HOURS.
But why ?
This was not a normal volatility. This was a structural unwind across metals and equities happening at the same time.
First, look at the scale of the damage.
Precious metals collapse: • Gold: −16.36%, wiping out $6.38 TRILLION • Silver: −38.9%, wiping out $2.6 TRILLION • Platinum: −29.5%, wiping out $235B • Palladium: −25%, wiping out $110B
Equities: • S&P 500: −1.88%, wiping out $1.3T • Nasdaq: −3.15%, wiping out $1.38T • Russell 2000: wiping out $100B
In total, well over $12 trillion vanished, which is more than the GDP of Germany, Japan, and India combined.
Here is what actually broke the market.
METALS WERE AT HISTORIC HIGHS
Silver had just printed 9 consecutive green monthly candles. That has never happened before.
The previous record was 8 green months, and that marked major cycle tops.
Silver had already delivered over a 3x return in 12 months. For a $5–$6 trillion asset, that is extreme.
At the peak, silver was up 65–70% YTD.
Gold was also deeply stretched after a parabolic run driven by easing expectations. At those levels, profit-taking was inevitable.
MOMENTUM PULLED IN LATE RETAIL AND LEVERAGE
The vertical rally sucked in a large wave of late buyers rotating out of crypto and equities. Most of this money did not go into physical metal.
It went into leveraged futures and paper contracts.
The dominant narrative was simple: Silver to $150–$200. That encouraged oversized long positions right at the top. When the price rolled over, liquidation started immediately.
LONG LIQUIDATION CASCADE TOOK OVER
Once silver dropped: • Margin calls triggered • Longs were forced out • Price dropped more • More liquidations followed
This is why silver collapsed over 35% in just 1 day. It was not sellers choosing to exit. It was forced selling.
PAPER MARKET STRESS VS PHYSICAL REALITY
The silver market is heavily paper-driven. Estimated paper-to-physical ratio: 300–350:1. That means hundreds of paper claims exist for every
💥BREAKING: Gold crashed 8% in just 60 MINUTES, wiping out over $3 TRILLION.
temporary profit booking
⚠️China is dumping US Treasuries and loading up on gold:
China's gold reserves hit 74.1 million ounces, an all-time high. At the same time, China's holdings of US Treasuries plunged to $682.6 billion, the lowest in 18 years.
China has slashed its Treasury position by over -$600 billion since the 2013 peak.
At the same time, the country's gold reserves more than DOUBLED.
China is actively diversifying away from Dollar-denominated assets into hard assets.
Expect this trend to accelerate. be ready to pay more for gold
GOLD & SILVER DUMPED AND.. Over $6 TRILLION in market cap wiped out within 30 minutes.
Do you understand how crazy that is?
That’s more wealth than the GDP of the UK + France gone faster than ordering a pizza.
This doesn’t even feel real.
Why are we seeing this?
Extreme events like this almost always come from the market’s structure: instantaneous de-leveraging, cascading margin calls, collateral evaporation, and forced selling.
We’re talking about massive internal strains in the system’s mechanics.
Translation: THE SYSTEM JUST BROKE
When precious metals, "safe haven" assets, vaporize trillions in minutes, they’re telling you, explicitly, that we are living through a real paradigm shift.
The next few days will be INSANE, but don’t worry I’ll keep you updated like I always do.
I’ve studied macro for 10 years and I called almost every major market top, including the October BTC ATH.
Follow and turn notifications on. I’ll post the warning BEFORE it hits the headlines.