🚨 HERE'S HOW THE BIGGEST METALS EXPLOIT HAPPENED!
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 result is simple.
A massive price dislocation.