How and by whom? Seriously I don't understand.
I don't have time to break it all the way down right now LG.I gotta run but this all IMO. but here is one ex. JPMorgan inherited a massive amount of silver shorts priced between $20 and $21 when it took over Bear Stearns. Combined with HSBC, the two mega banks covered 85% of all silver shorts.
That right there is a solid case for manipulation because the short position was so massive compared to physical silver trading and long positions. What's worse, the U.S. Treasury created the situation.
If the free market resolved the situation, silver would have more than doubled as the short position was covered and evaporated.
The massive position was maintained for years because it wasn't easy to wind down. Any large-scale attempts to unwind the position would be countered by other big traders and result in a loss. JPMorgan didn't have to, though; it simply needed to rig the system to turn a buck.
A precious metal trader named Andrew Maguire sent detailed information in an email to the CFTC on Feb. 3, 2010, about what to expect in two days after he noticed signals from JPMorgan and HSBC traders using after-hours high-frequency trades to crush prices.
His description was perfectly accurate. The trader, selling four hundred contracts per second, dumped 45,000 contracts into the market. Each was for 5,000 troy ounces for a grand total of 7,000 tonnes. The seller then suddenly shifted and started purchasing everything he could. Still moving far faster than other traders, he or she walked with $3.6 billion.
In more recent history, JPMorgan has been holding about 25% of the silver short market with the largest eight commercial silver shorts account for 50% to 60%. Estimates put paper silver positions at 143 times the actual amount of physical silver traded.
Massive volumes of sell orders are placed and canceled in fractions of a second by them. The lower sell prices still appear in market data for anyone that cannot handle trading by the millisecond, leading to panic selling by other (much slower) traders.
The high-frequency trading system then snaps up the positions for profit. After all, they never sold anything to begin with... they simply maintained short positions and canceled sales to buy at discounts.
