How GameStop May Make Hedging Cheaper

 From Zero Hedge:

"ROBINHOOD WILL HAVE TO BREAK INTO MY WIFE’S BOYFRIEND’S HOUSE IF THEY WANT TO FORCE ME TO SELL MY GME" - r/WallStreetBets meme.  

An Inverse Of 1987

One of the more interesting takes on the GameStop (GME) saga last week came from Bloomberg's Joe Wiesenthal, drawing on the work of Emanuel Derman. For those unfamiliar with Derman, he was one of the first physicists to make the transition to quantitative finance in the '80s, moving from Bell Labs to Goldman Sachs (full disclosure: we've corresponded and met with Dr. Derman in the past, and he was kind enough to offer some feedback on our security selection algorithm). 

Wiesenthal referred to Derman's memoir, My Life As A Quant. 

In that book, Derman observed that after the 1987 crash, put options permanently became more expensive. Wiesenthal speculated on Twitter that in the wake of the GameStop melt-up, the same might happen to call options. Derman agreed. 

More Expensive Calls, Less Expensive Collars

All else equal, more expensive calls would be good news for investors looking to hedge with collars. We haven't seen that with GameStop itself yet, but we did get a preview of it with one of the other meme stocks last week, Nokia (NOK). In our previous post (WallStreetBets Versus The Crackdown), we presented an extraordinary collar on Nokia:

A Hedged Bet On Nokia

Nokia offers an even better setup than BlackBerry did earlier this week in terms of upside potential versus downside risk. Let's say you picked up a 1,000 shares of NOK on the dip Thursday. This was the optimal collar, as of Thursday's close, to hedge your 1,000 shares of NOK against a >25% drop over the next month while capping your upside on the stock at 100%.

Screen capture via the Portfolio Armor iPhone app.

It's rare that you're able to cap a collar this high, which makes for the attractive risk-versus-reward setup here. Also, note the negative hedging cost.

That hedge was as of Thursday's close; using the same parameters, you could have found a similar optimal collar on Friday as well. 

Still Too Risky For Some

For at least one reader, that Nokia hedge, with its 25% maximum downside, was too risky. Our regular commenter "propaganda4u" wrote,

Your worse case loss should never be more than 5%. Didn't you learn anything from William O'Neill?

William O'Neill, the founder of Investor's Business Daily, is of course known for his trading rules, including those regarding cutting losses. His rule is to sell when a stock drops 7%, not 5%. 

My philosophy is that all stocks are bad. There are no good stocks unless they are going up in price, if they go down instead, you have to cut your losses fast. The key is to lose the least amount of money possible when you're wrong. I make it a rule to never lose more than 7% on any stock I buy. If a stock drops 7% below my purchase price, I will automatically sell it without any hesitation.

This rule does not limit your potential losses on a stock to 7% though. Stocks can gap down much further on bad news. It's not unheard of for a stock to open down 20% or more from its previous close after an earnings miss or other bad news. Here's an example of Snap (SNAP) doing that a few years ago (there are more recent examples, but this chart was handy). 

If you had a stop order to sell this after it pulled back 7%, that wouldn't have helped you there. Hedging, unlike trading rules, can actually protect against drops of more than 7%, or more than 5%, if you're that risk averse. 

Investing Without Risking A >5% Loss

The good news for our extremely risk averse readers such as "propaganda4u" is that it is possible to invest without risking a drop of more than 5%. Our system can construct hedged portfolios designed to maximize returns for investors only willing to risk a 5% decline.

The Tradeoff Of Risking Only A 5% Decline

The tradeoff is that hedging against such small declines narrows the universe of securities available. To quantify that, consider this. Our universe includes about 4,500 securities with options traded on them in the U.S. On Friday, 1,860 of them passed our initial screens and were hedgeable against >9% declines. Only 231 of those were hedgeable against declines of >5%.

Whenever you ask our system to construct a hedged portfolio, it populates your portfolio with names that it estimates have the highest potential returns, net of hedging cost, out of the ones that fit your risk tolerance and portfolio size. If you indicated you were only willing to risk a decline of >5%, on Friday, it would have started with those 231 names that were hedgeable against a >5% decline. If you indicated that you had $100,000 to invest, our system would have filtered out names like Amazon (AMZN) that were hedgeable against >5% declines, but had share prices too high to fit a round lot in your portfolio. This is the hedged portfolio it would have presented you: 

Screen capture via Portfolio Armor.

As you can see in the portfolio summary, the max drawdown there was a decline of 4.86%. That's how much the portfolio would be down if every security in it went to $0 just before the hedges expired. 

Another Approach For The Risk Averse

Although the portfolio above limits your downside risk to a drop of 4.86% in the worst case scenario, its expected return over the next six months is fairly modest: 3.72%. Another approach for a risk averse investor would be to keep most of his money in cash and then take more risk in a hedged portfolio. For example, instead of investing 100% in a portfolio hedged against a >5% decline, invest 25% in a portfolio hedged against a >20% decline with the rest in cash. Our guess is that the second approach may do better. Let's check back in six months and see. 

"Everyone Is Afraid Ahead Of The Open" - Reddit-Raiders Spark Nationwide Physical Silver Shortage

 From Zero Hedge:

Update (1100ET): For some background on just how unprecedented this weekend's action in silver markets is, Tyler Wall, the CEO of SD Bullion writes the following (emphasis ours): 

In the 24 hours proceeding Friday market close, SD Bullion sold nearly 10x the number of silver ounces that we normally would sell in an entire weekend leading to Sunday market open.

In a normal market, we normally can find at least one supplier/source willing to sell some ounces over the weekend if we exceed our long position (the number of ounces we predict we will sell over the weekend).

However, everyone we talk to is afraid of a gap up at Sunday night market open.

This is about ready to get really interesting as there was very little inventory left from suppliers/mints going into Friday close.

Our direct AP supplier informed us after close on Friday that the "US Mint will be on allocation for the remainder of Type 1" (Current Silver Eagle Design).

Our sales for the month of January exceeded any one month last year during the heart of the pandemic. It was an all-time record month in our company history. 

And, perhaps most importantly, as QTR tweets so succinctly, "this is a red pill moment for many, and it's beautiful."

Additionally, there are also signs of a notable regime shift, as Bloomberg points out, investors are holding onto silver they own, rather than trying to take profits.

“Now we’re seeing nothing, no single offer, which is scary,” Peter Thomas, senior vice president at Zaner Group, said by phone from Chicago.

“Whatever we sell, people are holding it. There’s no inflow of metal at all.”

*  *  *

Update (1030ET): It would appear the run on silver has begun. With the market closed, traders have rushed to secure some exposure to silver ahead of what WSB suggests could be "the world's biggest short squeeze" and that has left bullion dealers 

As we noted below, the premium for physical silver had soared late Friday and into Saturday (after the massive flows into SLV), but as Sunday rolled around, bullion dealers are now facing massive shortages of physical coins.

Source: APMEX

Source: JMBullion

Source: SDBullion

And as one investor noted, the shortages are widespread...

We can only imagine where SLV will open after this.

*  *  *

While all eyes have been focused on GameStop and a handful of other heavily-shorted stocks as they exploded higher under continuous fire from WallStreetBets traders igniting a short-squeeze coinciding with a gamma-squeeze, the last few days saw another asset suddenly get in the crosshairs of the 'Reddit-Raiders' - Silver.

On Thursday, we asked "Is The Reddit Rebellion About To Descend On The Precious Metals Market?" ... One WallStreetBets user (jjalj30) posted the following last night:

Silver Bullion Market is one of the most manipulated on earth. Any short squeeze in silver paper shorts would be EPIC. We know billion banks are manipulating gold and silver to cover real inflation.

Both the industrial case and monetary case, debt printing has never been more favorable for the No. 1 inflation hedge Silver.

Inflation adjusted Silver should be at 1000$ instead of 25$. Link to post removed by mods.

Why not squeeze $SLV to real physical price.

Think about the Gainz. If you don't care about the gains, think about the banks like JP MORGAN you'd be destroying along the way.

...

Tldr- Corner the market. GV thinks its possible to squeeze $SLV, FUCK AFTER SEEING $AG AND $GME EVEN I THINK WE CAN DO IT. BUY $SLV GO ALL IN TH GAINZ WILL BE UNLIMITED. DEMAND PHYSICAL IF YOU CAN. FUCK THE BANKS.

Disclaimer: This is not Financial advice. I am not a financial services professional. This is my personal opinion and speculation as an uneducated and uninformed person.

...and judging by the unprecedented flows into the Silver ETF (SLV) they just got started...

SLV saw inflows of almost one billion dollars on Friday, almost double the previous record inflow for this 15 year-old ETF.

Source: Bloomberg

Which helped prompt a spike in SLV off Wednesday's lows of over 11% (and note that every surge in price was mimicked by gold, but gold was instantly monkey-hammered lower after the spike).

Source: Bloomberg

And judging by the asset flow, SLV has room to run here...

Source: Bloomberg

Just as short-interest in the ETF has been building...

Source: Bloomberg

This surge came after Reddit user 'TheHappyHawaiian' posted the following thesis on buying silver noting that "the worlds biggest short squeeze is possible and we can make history."

'TheHappyHawaiian' cites two reasons to buy - The Short Squeeze and Fundamentals.

The short squeeze:

Buy SLV shares (or PSLV shares) and SLV call options to force physical delivery of silver to the SLV vaults.

The silver futures market has oscillated between having roughly 100-1 and 500-1 ratio of paper traded silver to physical silver, but lets call it 250-1 for now. This means that for every 250 ounces in open interest in the futures market, only 1 actually gets delivered. Most traders would rather settle with cash rather than take delivery of thousands of ounces of silver and have to figure out to store and transport it in the future.

The people naked shorting silver via the futures markets are a couple of large banks and making them pay dearly for their over leveraged naked shorts would be incredible. It's not Melvin capital on the other side of this trade, its JP Morgan. Time to get some payback for the bailouts and manipulation they've done for decades (look up silver manipulation fines that JPM has paid over the years).

The way the squeeze could occur is by forcing a much higher percentage of the futures contracts to actually deliver physical silver. There is very little silver in the COMEX vaults or available to actually be use to deliver, and if they have to start buying en masse on the open market they will drive the price massively higher. There is no way to magically create more physical silver in the world that is ready to be delivered. With a stock you can eventually just issue more shares if the price rises too much, but this simply isn't the case here. The futures market is kind of the wild west of the financial world. Real commodities are being traded, and if you are short, you literally have to deliver thousands of ounces of silver per contract if the holder on the other side demands it. If you remember oil going negative back in May, that was possible because futures are allowed to trade to their true value. They aren't halted and that's what will make this so fun when the true squeeze happens.

Edit for more detail: let’s say there’s one futures seller who gets unlucky and gets the buyer who actually wants to take delivery. He doesn’t have the silver and realizes it’s all of a sudden damn difficult to find some physical silver. He throws up his hands and just goes long a matching number of futures contracts and will demand actual delivery on those. Problem solved because he has now matched the demanding buyer with a new seller. The issue is that the new seller has the same issue and does the exact same thing. This is how the cascade effect of a meltup occurs. All the naked shorts trying to offload their position to someone who actually has some silver. My goal is to ensure that I have the silver and won’t sell to them until silver is at a far higher price due to the desperation.

The silver market is much larger than GME in terms of notional value, but there is very little physical silver actually readily available (think about the difference between total shares and the shares in the active float for a stock), and the paper silver trading hands in the futures market is hundreds of times larger than what is available. Thus when they are forced to actually deliver physical silver it will create a massive short squeeze where an absurd amount of silver will be sought after (to fulfill their contractually obligated delivery) with very little available to actually buy. They are naked shorting silver and will have to cover all at once and the float as a percentage of the total silver stock globally is truly miniscule.

The fundamentals:

The current gold to silver ratio is 73-1. Meaning the price of gold per ounce is 73 times the price of silver. Naturally occurring silver is only 18.75 times as common as gold, so this ratio of 73-1 is quite high. Until the early 20th century, silver prices were pegged at a 15-1 ratio to gold in the US because this ratio was relatively known even then. In terms of current production, the ratio is even lower at 8-1. Meaning the world is only producing 8 ounces of silver for each newly produced ounce of gold.

Global industry has been able to get away with producing so little new silver for so long because governments have dumped silver on the market for 80 years, but now their silver vaults are empty. At the end of WW2 government vaults globally contained 10 billion ounces of silver, but as we moved to fiat currency and away from precious metal backed currencies, the amount held by governments has decreased to only 0.24 billion ounces as they dumped their supply into the market. But this dumping is done now as their remaining supply is basically nil.

This 0.24 billion ounces represents only 8% of the total supply of only 3 billion ounces stored as investment globally. This means that 92% of that gold is held privately by institutions and by millions of boomer gold and silver bugs who have been sitting on meager gains for decades. These boomers aren't going to sell no matter what because they see their silver cache as part of their doomsday prepper supplies. It's locked away in bunkers they built 500 miles from their house. Also, with silver at $23 an ounce currently, this means all of the worlds investment grade silver only has a total market cap of $70 billion. For comparison the investment grade gold in the world is worth roughly $6 trillion. This is because most of the silver produced each year actually gets used, as I have mentioned. $70 billion sounds like a lot, but we don’t have to buy all that much for the price to go up a lot.

**If the squeeze happens, it would be like 40 years worth of their gains in 4 months **

The reason that only 8 ounces of silver are produced for every 1 ounce of gold in today's world is because there aren't really any good naturally occurring silver deposits left in the world. Silver is more common than gold in the earth's crust, but it is spread very thin. Thus nearly every ounce of silver produces is actually a byproduct of mining for other metals such as gold or copper. This means that even as the silver price skyrockets, it wont be easy to increase the supply of silver being produced. Even if new mines were to be constructed, it could take years to come online.

Finally, most of this newly created silver supply each year is used for productive purposes rather than kept for investment. It is used in electronics, solar panels, and jewelry for the most part. This demand wont go away if the silver price rises, so the short sellers will be trying to get their hands on a very small slice of newly minted silver. The solar market is also growing quickly and political pressure to increase solar and electric vehicles could provide more industrial demand.

The other part of the story is the faster moving piece and that is the inflation and currency debasement fear portion. The government and the fed are printing money like crazy debasing the value of the dollar, so investors look for real assets like precious metals to hide out in, driving demand for silver. The $1.9 trillion stimulus passing in a month or two could be a good catalyst. All this money combined with the reopening of the economy could cause some solid inflation to occur, and once inflation starts it often feeds on itself.

What to buy:

I will be putting 50% directly into SLV shares, and 50% into the $35 strike SLV calls expiring 4/16.

This way the SLV purchase creates a groundswell into silver immediately that then rockets through a gamma squeeze as SLV approaches $35.

Price target of $75 for SLV by end of April if the short squeeze happens.

Edit: for the part of your purchases going into shares, some people recommend PSLV because they think SLV might start lying about having the silver in their vault. Or that the custodian will be double counting, ie claiming that the same silver belongs to multiple people (banking on the fact that people wont all try to get their silver at once). So if you buy SLV shares and calls, that's great. But I think it could be prudent for us to buy options in SLV (no options on PSLV) and shares in PSLV. It all depends on how paranoid you want to be. There is a lot of paranoia in the precious metals world.

Alternate options:

• buying physical silver; this also works but you pay a premium to buy and sell so its less efficient and you take fewer silver ounces off of the market because of the premium you pay

• going long futures for February or March; if you are a rich bastard and can actually take physical delivery of 1000s of ounces of silver by all means do so. But if you simply settle for cash you are actually part of the problem. We need actual physical delivery, which is what SLV demands and is why SLV is the way to go unless you are going to take delivery

• miners; I don’t recommend buying miners as part of this trade. Miners will absolutely go up if SLV goes up, but buying them doesn't create the squeeze in the actual silver market. Furthermore, most silver miners only derive 30-50% of their revenue from silver anyways, so eventually SLV will outperform them as it gets high enough (and each marginal SLV dollar only increases miner profits by a smaller and smaller percentage)

Details on SLV physical settlement:

When SLV issues shares, the custodian is forced to true up their vaults with the proportional amount of silver daily. From the SLV prospectus:

"An investment in Shares is: Backed by silver held by the Custodian on behalf of the Trust. The Shares are backed by the assets of the Trust. The Trustee’s arrangements with the Custodian contemplate that at the end of each business day there can be in the Trust account maintained by the Custodian no more than 1,100 ounces of silver in an unallocated form. The bulk of the Trust’s silver holdings is represented by physical silver, identified on the Custodian’s or, if applicable, sub-custodian's, books in allocated and unallocated accounts on behalf of the Trust and is held by the Custodian in London, New York and other locations that may be authorized in the future."

'TheHappyHawaiian" ends with a call to (financial) arms:

Join me brothers. Lets take silver to the moon and take on the biggest and baddest manipulators in the world.

Please post rocket emojis in the comments as desired.

Disclaimer: do your own research, make your own decisions, everything here is a guess and hypothetical and nothing is guaranteed, not a financial advisor, I have ADHD and maybe other things too.

Bear case: silver does tend to sell off if the broader market plunges so it’s not immune to broad market sell off. It’s also the most manipulated market in the world so we are facing some tough competition on the short side

Interestingly, 'TheHappyHawaiian' dropped this update on 1/29:

Due to the manipulation and collusion of citadel, hedge funds, and brokers to change the rules and rig the game in their favor. Who likely knew ahead of time and bought puts right before and calls at the bottom, GME is too important to abandon still. SLV is still my next play but GME needs to go to $1000 and these people need to go to jail.

However, judging by the massive physical premiums for silver we are seeing this weekend at APMEX...

... JM Bullion...

... and SD Bullion.

...there are more than a few who are already rotating to SLV from GME.

Caveat Emptor - Are You A WSB 'Useful Idiot'?

 From ZH

While high-fives and smily-faces abound on the interwebs over the destruction wrought on numerous hedge funds amid the short- and gamma-squeezes in GME and the rest of the heavily-shorted names, some are at least taking a moment to pause and reflect on other possibilities about how this all ends...

Via 'The_Law_of_Pizza':

I don't work on the trading Floor, but I'm an attorney who services a variety of financial institutions, including broker/dealers.

This isn't the exciting, hilarious answer you want, but a lot of people had no idea it was even happening until the past 48 hours, and even now, it's mostly just a funny news article about some internet trolls making a bubble.

This is a big deal to the shorting community, but to the other 99% of the financial world, nobody gives a shit.

As much as young people on the internet like to imagine this as an epic, David vs Goliath, Wall Street vs Main Street showdown for the history books; from a bird's eye view its actually just a brief dumpster fire where a couple hedge funds lost their shirts betting on one little small cap stock. It has happened before, and it will happen again.

In 6 months, nobody will remember or care, except that (maybe) it will become more difficult for retail investors to trade options.

And not because the greedy hedge fund oligarchs forced the SEC to crack down on retail investors.

But rather because, when this is all said and done, there is going to be a black hole where most of these retail investors' brokerage accounts used to be, and the SEC and brokerage community will be lambasted for failing to protect unsophisticated investors from a bubble.

I have been monitoring the WSB threads, and while the WSB veterans know that they're making a suicide charge for the memes, they have brought thousands of naive, new investors with them - who predominantly think that they're going to somehow come out on top, not realizing that they're cannon fodder for the more savvy WSB users to exit with gains.

Redditors never seem to stop and think about why the WSB guys know so much about derivatives trading.

Or how they seem to know how to access and read from a Bloomberg Terminal.

Or why there are so many users there that can seemingly drop tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on complicated meme plays.

How do you think that WSB knew that GME was open to a short squeeze and a gamma squeeze play?

WSB's power users are younger finance bros. It's 30-something investment bankers and portfolio managers memeing with each other a. cosplaying as "autists."

If you didn't know what a gamma squeeze was 48 hours ago, you are their exit strategy and the down payment on their next Porsche.

Caveat Emptor indeed.

Robinhood Caps Maximum Holdings In 36 Stocks To Just One Share

 From Zero Hedge:

Something bad is about to go down at Robinhood.

One day after the company drew down on its bank lines and obtain a $1 billion rescue capital investment, the company found itself in lockdown mode, allowing just a handful of shares to be bought at a time, effectively shutting down in all but name (it couldn't risk another day of furious public outcry and massive client departures if it blocked trading completely).

However, just before the close, things got downright surreal when in a blog post the broker - which should probably change its name from Robinhood to Suit - made a shocking announcement: going forward, customers will be subject to maximum aggregate limits in 51 securities of which 14 are capped at position limits of just 5 shares, while allowing total holdings in 36 securities to be just one share!

In other words, as of this moment, no client is allowed to one more than 1 share in names like GME, AMC, AG, BBBY, BYND, WKHS and many others. Even boring, low vol names like GM and SBUX are limited to just one share.

This is what the blog post said:

"The table below shows the maximum number of shares and options contracts to which you can increase your positions. Please note that these are aggregate limits for each security and not per-order limits, and include shares and options contracts that you already hold. These limits may be subject to change throughout the day."

Panicked clients who are wondering if this means that their current holdings which exceed 1 laughable share will be forcefully liquidated can breathe for now: the company said that "outside of our standard margin-related sellouts or options assignment procedures, your positions will not be sold for the sole reason that you are currently over the limit. However, you will not be able to open more positions of each of these securities unless you sell enough of your holdings such that you are below the respective limit." (we expect that to change on Monday, if the company is still around.)

In other words, virtually nobody can buy any new securities.

The company also disclosed that no fractional shares can be bought going forward as "fractional shares are currently position closing only for all of the securities listed in the table above. This means you can sell and close your fractional positions, but you can't open new fractional positions. However, you can still open new whole share positions according to the limits listed above."

Why is this happening? The most likely reason is that between DTC, clearinghouses and other regulatory entities, Robinhood was found to be in another capital deficiency position - even with the billions raised overnight - and it is being forced to delever.

This likely means that Robinhood is as of this moment, scrambling to obtain even more capital, although we somehow doubt it will be just as easy to "take from the rich" as it was late last night especially since the client exodus is surely accelerating.

It also means that we may have to have another "Lehman Weekend" situation on our hands, only this time it will be a "Robinhood Weekend", and an urgent acquisition from a strategic buyer may be required to prevent the worst case outcome. We only hope that the billions in funds held in custody for clients is segregated should the company collapse (pinging Jon Corzine here).

In any case, expect a lot of Robinhood related news over the weekend.

* * *

And as a postscript, while we expect that the turmoil will be contained at Robinhood, whether in the form of new capital infusion, a takeover, or bankruptcy, there is the possibility that the liqudity shortfall goes as far as the clearinghouses. What happens then? Below we excerpt from a monthly letter written by Horseman's Russell Clark who had a good recap of "what if":

Pre-financial crisis, banks and clearinghouses were part of one big and messy system. Banks mainly traded with other banks as it was cheaper, but every now and then they would trade through a clearinghouse. There were two types of trades. Circular trades, which are trades where each bank has a position, but the system has a flat position, and directional trades, where the system would match up buyers who wanted to take a view on future movements of financial markets. Directional trades are more dangerous; risk will be less evenly distributed as it will have no offsetting trades.

When Lehman went bust, LCH, the biggest interest rate derivative clearinghouse, found they only needed one third of the initial margin to cover losses. This encouraged regulators to move clearinghouses to the center of the financial system. However, this has caused two big problems.

Firstly, clearinghouses have no real "skin in the game". They act like a bookie, that takes bets from punters, and transfers money from winners to losers. But how much risk should they take? What is the correct level of initial margin? Clearinghouses used to piggyback on bank's risk measures, but without banks to guide them, how should they set risk? Clearing houses and regulators chose to use a backward-looking model, with risks set from market data from between 3 and 10 years in the past. This has caused the markets to have a built-in momentum model which amplifies cycle both ways. Hence, many of the normal trading rules don't apply. There will be no signs of problems in the market until right at the last moment. Markets are no longer discounting mechanisms and have become more akin to momentum models.

Secondly, banks are now deeply capital constrained, and at the start were very reluctant to move old trades to a centrally cleared model. This problem was resolved through a carrot and stick approach. The stick is uncleared trades carry a capital charge, and the carrot is that the exchanges offer very attractive "netting". What netting means is that banks can give details of all their trades to a third party, and any circular trades can then be netted off thus requiring less margin. LCH claim to have done a quadrillion of compression trades or netting in the last year, this is more than twice the notional of all outstanding interest rate derivatives.

The problem should be apparent. Clearinghouses were safe because, if there was a problem, the circular trades netted off on settlement. But by aggressively netting off at the margin stage they are no longer as safe. In fact they are very risky. This was highlighted by the near failure of a small clearinghouse in Europe last year. Using BIS data on the penetration of central clearing, and pricing of interest rate derivatives as a proxy of initial margins, I would say that initial margin in the system needs to rise by about 6 times to make the system "safe". Looking at previous periods of rising initial margins in 2000-2002 and 2007-2009, the pro-cyclicality of claringhouses should be obvious.

Finally, cash hoarding and repo market problems could be a sign of counterparties beginning to worry about clearinghouses. If initial margins rise significantly, the only assets that will see a bid will be cash, US treasuries, JGBs, Bunds, Yen and Swiss Franc. Everything else will likely face selling pressure. If a major clearinghouse should fail due to two counterparties failing, then many centrally cleared hedges will also fail. If this happens, you will not receive the cash from your bearish hedge, as the counterparty has gone bust, and the clearinghouse needs to pay from its own capital or even get be recapitalised itself. One way to think about it is that the financial crisis only metastasized when MG failed, because at that point, everyone suddenly became un-hedged, and everyone needed to sell.

Reddit Preparing To Unleash "World's Biggest Short Squeeze" In Silver

 From Zero Hedge:

While all eyes have been focused on GameStop and a handful of other heavily-shorted stocks as they exploded higher under continuous fire from WallStreetBets traders igniting a short-squeeze coinciding with a gamma-squeeze, the last few days saw another asset suddenly get in the crosshairs of the 'Reddit-Raiders' - Silver.

On Thursday, we asked "Is The Reddit Rebellion About To Descend On The Precious Metals Market?" ... One WallStreetBets user (jjalj30) posted the following last night:

Silver Bullion Market is one of the most manipulated on earth. Any short squeeze in silver paper shorts would be EPIC. We know billion banks are manipulating gold and silver to cover real inflation.

Both the industrial case and monetary case, debt printing has never been more favorable for the No. 1 inflation hedge Silver.

Inflation adjusted Silver should be at 1000$ instead of 25$. Link to post removed by mods.

Why not squeeze $SLV to real physical price.

Think about the Gainz. If you don't care about the gains, think about the banks like JP MORGAN you'd be destroying along the way.

...

Tldr- Corner the market. GV thinks its possible to squeeze $SLV, FUCK AFTER SEEING $AG AND $GME EVEN I THINK WE CAN DO IT. BUY $SLV GO ALL IN TH GAINZ WILL BE UNLIMITED. DEMAND PHYSICAL IF YOU CAN. FUCK THE BANKS.

Disclaimer: This is not Financial advice. I am not a financial services professional. This is my personal opinion and speculation as an uneducated and uninformed person.

...and judging by the unprecedented flows into the Silver ETF (SLV) they just got started...

SLV saw inflows of almost one billion dollars on Friday, almost double the previous record inflow for this 15 year-old ETF.

Source: Bloomberg

Which helped prompt a spike in SLV off Wednesday's lows of over 11% (and note that every surge in price was mimicked by gold, but gold was instantly monkey-hammered lower after the spike).

Source: Bloomberg

And judging by the asset flow, SLV has room to run here...

Source: Bloomberg

Just as short-interest in the ETF has been building...

Source: Bloomberg

This surge came after Reddit user 'TheHappyHawaiian' posted the following thesis on buying silver noting that "the worlds biggest short squeeze is possible and we can make history."

'TheHappyHawaiian' cites two reasons to buy - The Short Squeeze and Fundamentals.

The short squeeze:

Buy SLV shares (or PSLV shares) and SLV call options to force physical delivery of silver to the SLV vaults.

The silver futures market has oscillated between having roughly 100-1 and 500-1 ratio of paper traded silver to physical silver, but lets call it 250-1 for now. This means that for every 250 ounces in open interest in the futures market, only 1 actually gets delivered. Most traders would rather settle with cash rather than take delivery of thousands of ounces of silver and have to figure out to store and transport it in the future.

The people naked shorting silver via the futures markets are a couple of large banks and making them pay dearly for their over leveraged naked shorts would be incredible. It's not Melvin capital on the other side of this trade, its JP Morgan. Time to get some payback for the bailouts and manipulation they've done for decades (look up silver manipulation fines that JPM has paid over the years).

The way the squeeze could occur is by forcing a much higher percentage of the futures contracts to actually deliver physical silver. There is very little silver in the COMEX vaults or available to actually be use to deliver, and if they have to start buying en masse on the open market they will drive the price massively higher. There is no way to magically create more physical silver in the world that is ready to be delivered. With a stock you can eventually just issue more shares if the price rises too much, but this simply isn't the case here. The futures market is kind of the wild west of the financial world. Real commodities are being traded, and if you are short, you literally have to deliver thousands of ounces of silver per contract if the holder on the other side demands it. If you remember oil going negative back in May, that was possible because futures are allowed to trade to their true value. They aren't halted and that's what will make this so fun when the true squeeze happens.

Edit for more detail: let’s say there’s one futures seller who gets unlucky and gets the buyer who actually wants to take delivery. He doesn’t have the silver and realizes it’s all of a sudden damn difficult to find some physical silver. He throws up his hands and just goes long a matching number of futures contracts and will demand actual delivery on those. Problem solved because he has now matched the demanding buyer with a new seller. The issue is that the new seller has the same issue and does the exact same thing. This is how the cascade effect of a meltup occurs. All the naked shorts trying to offload their position to someone who actually has some silver. My goal is to ensure that I have the silver and won’t sell to them until silver is at a far higher price due to the desperation.

The silver market is much larger than GME in terms of notional value, but there is very little physical silver actually readily available (think about the difference between total shares and the shares in the active float for a stock), and the paper silver trading hands in the futures market is hundreds of times larger than what is available. Thus when they are forced to actually deliver physical silver it will create a massive short squeeze where an absurd amount of silver will be sought after (to fulfill their contractually obligated delivery) with very little available to actually buy. They are naked shorting silver and will have to cover all at once and the float as a percentage of the total silver stock globally is truly miniscule.

The fundamentals:

The current gold to silver ratio is 73-1. Meaning the price of gold per ounce is 73 times the price of silver. Naturally occurring silver is only 18.75 times as common as gold, so this ratio of 73-1 is quite high. Until the early 20th century, silver prices were pegged at a 15-1 ratio to gold in the US because this ratio was relatively known even then. In terms of current production, the ratio is even lower at 8-1. Meaning the world is only producing 8 ounces of silver for each newly produced ounce of gold.

Global industry has been able to get away with producing so little new silver for so long because governments have dumped silver on the market for 80 years, but now their silver vaults are empty. At the end of WW2 government vaults globally contained 10 billion ounces of silver, but as we moved to fiat currency and away from precious metal backed currencies, the amount held by governments has decreased to only 0.24 billion ounces as they dumped their supply into the market. But this dumping is done now as their remaining supply is basically nil.

This 0.24 billion ounces represents only 8% of the total supply of only 3 billion ounces stored as investment globally. This means that 92% of that gold is held privately by institutions and by millions of boomer gold and silver bugs who have been sitting on meager gains for decades. These boomers aren't going to sell no matter what because they see their silver cache as part of their doomsday prepper supplies. It's locked away in bunkers they built 500 miles from their house. Also, with silver at $23 an ounce currently, this means all of the worlds investment grade silver only has a total market cap of $70 billion. For comparison the investment grade gold in the world is worth roughly $6 trillion. This is because most of the silver produced each year actually gets used, as I have mentioned. $70 billion sounds like a lot, but we don’t have to buy all that much for the price to go up a lot.

**If the squeeze happens, it would be like 40 years worth of their gains in 4 months **

The reason that only 8 ounces of silver are produced for every 1 ounce of gold in today's world is because there aren't really any good naturally occurring silver deposits left in the world. Silver is more common than gold in the earth's crust, but it is spread very thin. Thus nearly every ounce of silver produces is actually a byproduct of mining for other metals such as gold or copper. This means that even as the silver price skyrockets, it wont be easy to increase the supply of silver being produced. Even if new mines were to be constructed, it could take years to come online.

Finally, most of this newly created silver supply each year is used for productive purposes rather than kept for investment. It is used in electronics, solar panels, and jewelry for the most part. This demand wont go away if the silver price rises, so the short sellers will be trying to get their hands on a very small slice of newly minted silver. The solar market is also growing quickly and political pressure to increase solar and electric vehicles could provide more industrial demand.

The other part of the story is the faster moving piece and that is the inflation and currency debasement fear portion. The government and the fed are printing money like crazy debasing the value of the dollar, so investors look for real assets like precious metals to hide out in, driving demand for silver. The $1.9 trillion stimulus passing in a month or two could be a good catalyst. All this money combined with the reopening of the economy could cause some solid inflation to occur, and once inflation starts it often feeds on itself.

What to buy:

I will be putting 50% directly into SLV shares, and 50% into the $35 strike SLV calls expiring 4/16.

This way the SLV purchase creates a groundswell into silver immediately that then rockets through a gamma squeeze as SLV approaches $35.

Price target of $75 for SLV by end of April if the short squeeze happens.

Edit: for the part of your purchases going into shares, some people recommend PSLV because they think SLV might start lying about having the silver in their vault. Or that the custodian will be double counting, ie claiming that the same silver belongs to multiple people (banking on the fact that people wont all try to get their silver at once). So if you buy SLV shares and calls, that's great. But I think it could be prudent for us to buy options in SLV (no options on PSLV) and shares in PSLV. It all depends on how paranoid you want to be. There is a lot of paranoia in the precious metals world.

Alternate options:

• buying physical silver; this also works but you pay a premium to buy and sell so its less efficient and you take fewer silver ounces off of the market because of the premium you pay

• going long futures for February or March; if you are a rich bastard and can actually take physical delivery of 1000s of ounces of silver by all means do so. But if you simply settle for cash you are actually part of the problem. We need actual physical delivery, which is what SLV demands and is why SLV is the way to go unless you are going to take delivery

• miners; I don’t recommend buying miners as part of this trade. Miners will absolutely go up if SLV goes up, but buying them doesn't create the squeeze in the actual silver market. Furthermore, most silver miners only derive 30-50% of their revenue from silver anyways, so eventually SLV will outperform them as it gets high enough (and each marginal SLV dollar only increases miner profits by a smaller and smaller percentage)

Details on SLV physical settlement:

When SLV issues shares, the custodian is forced to true up their vaults with the proportional amount of silver daily. From the SLV prospectus:

"An investment in Shares is: Backed by silver held by the Custodian on behalf of the Trust. The Shares are backed by the assets of the Trust. The Trustee’s arrangements with the Custodian contemplate that at the end of each business day there can be in the Trust account maintained by the Custodian no more than 1,100 ounces of silver in an unallocated form. The bulk of the Trust’s silver holdings is represented by physical silver, identified on the Custodian’s or, if applicable, sub-custodian's, books in allocated and unallocated accounts on behalf of the Trust and is held by the Custodian in London, New York and other locations that may be authorized in the future."

'TheHappyHawaiian" ends with a call to (financial) arms:

Join me brothers. Lets take silver to the moon and take on the biggest and baddest manipulators in the world.

Please post rocket emojis in the comments as desired.

Disclaimer: do your own research, make your own decisions, everything here is a guess and hypothetical and nothing is guaranteed, not a financial advisor, I have ADHD and maybe other things too.

Bear case: silver does tend to sell off if the broader market plunges so it’s not immune to broad market sell off. It’s also the most manipulated market in the world so we are facing some tough competition on the short side

Interestingly, 'TheHappyHawaiian' dropped this update on 1/29:

Due to the manipulation and collusion of citadel, hedge funds, and brokers to change the rules and rig the game in their favor. Who likely knew ahead of time and bought puts right before and calls at the bottom, GME is too important to abandon still. SLV is still my next play but GME needs to go to $1000 and these people need to go to jail.

However, judging by the massive physical premiums for silver we are seeing this weekend at APMEX...

... and JM Bullion...

...there are more than a few who are already rotating to SLV from GME.