there are 18 days left ..., page-4

time will tell SP, it's bold to put a count of days but gives something for people to do in the mean time.

will all that is being said and done, the frustration within both sides of the gold rally is painful to have to keep reading through. to the victor will certainly go the spoils, whomever it may eventually be.

as we know, the sellers are only processing a small percentage of sales as physical gold (at the moment) - a high percentage of the gold market is still leveraged sales on physical volumes. I'd like to see more news of physical deliveries defaulting that would certainly add weight to the above.

not well researched or documented is the source of the physical gold of the sellers (i.e. the central banks). they could not simply be drawing down on existing stockpiles.

I suspect a large proportion of the banks stock replenishment historically (that is largely reducing) is the massive hedges that are/were in place with the producers themselves. Large amounts of funding was often arranged through the use of hedging and forward contracts. The benficiaries would have been those providing the funding aka the banks.

Barrick say they got rid of (or are getting rid of) 6Moz hedging; locally most of our guys have done away with it also.

At the end of the day, if we are indeed in a bull gold market dressed in bear suits, then either the stock of what is being offered for sale will be reducing at a great rate of knots, or they are shorting and buying gold in a speculative market, or somewhere is several hundreds of tonnes of gold sitting idle ready to absorb the demand.

Will be keeping my eyes on the open interest volumes and the bank participation reports that come out. I won't hold my breath on any meaningful market regulation to come from the CFTC or the SEC - sadly this is where the single biggest risk lays presently. But like others would enjoy the surprise.

On a lighter note, am now holding my first ever purchase of physical gold. It is a sense of assurance once you actually have it to hold in light of the adventures of the last 12 months. I wonder if that's what those with billions of dollars at risk would be thinking also.