HERE’S WHAT REALLY WENT DOWN IN #METALS — AND WHY IT WASN’T “NORMAL
What happened wasn’t random volatility.
It was a mechanical squeeze + settlement exploit that crushed the crowd and paid the insiders.
Banks and brokers walked away with billions.
Everyone else ate the damage.
Let me break this down clean and simple 👇
#Silver pricing isn’t based on one market.
• LBMA sets its reference price at 12:00 UK time
• COMEX settles later using a 1-minute VWAP (13:24–13:25 ET)
• Most OTC silver contracts settle off LBMA, especially near month-end
Now look at Jan 30.
LBMA silver settled around $103
COMEX later settled near $78
That gap is insane.
And here’s the red flag: only metals collapsed.
Stocks? Fine.
Bonds? Fine.
Other commodities? Stable.
That doesn’t happen naturally.
Here’s the play:
After LBMA locked its price, COMEX was pushed aggressively lower.
Open interest dropped hard into the close — meaning positions were being cleared at the worst possible prices.
Banks holding shorts benefited massively once COMEX flushed after the LBMA benchmark was already fixed.
Then it got uglier.
Silver ETFs kept trading after LBMA settled.
$SLV traded at a huge discount to NAV.
That opened the door for authorized participants to: • Buy panicked ETF shares cheap
• Redeem them for physical silver at the higher reference price
• Pocket the spread
And the data confirms it: $SLV share count jumped tens of millions of shares in one day.
Add in leveraged ETFs being forced to unwind, and brokers cleaning up on derivatives — and you get one outcome:
💰 Massive transfer of wealth in a single session
This wasn’t just paper vs physical. It was exchange vs exchange, product vs product, retail vs institutions.
Trading resumes soon.
And with China + India still absorbing physical supply, this story may not be over.
When price breaks like this, it’s not the end
it’s usually the setup.
Stay sharp.
Markets don’t scream before they move
