I have very little skin in the game for precious metals (aside from the indirect benefit Teck Resources, soon to be Anglo Teck, mines from the ground) but I was just looking at the futures trading today in gold, platinum and silver, and oh my god. Here is platinum (down 18%) and silver (down 26%):
Charts are Pacific Time Zone.
This type of trading reminds me of October 2008-styled selling. As in panic selling. Somebody got caught with long exposure on the futures and were clearly forced to dump – you don’t see 25% down moves in a day like this very often in any broad market! Silver actually got all the way to -35% before rebounding – timing this exact bottom would be an impossible feat. Just imagine you woke up, saw silver down 10% and thought to yourself “surely, this would be a great time to average down on my long” before receiving a summary financial execution hours later. Or at around 1:50am, you bottom-ticked the futures at US$95 long and was giving yourself a pat on the back until 7 hours later when you were underwater.
Volatility begets volatility and Monday will be very interesting. This should also be a warning shot across the bow of crypto traders, but will it be a portent to the main indexes?