COMEX Warehouse Stocks Mar 11, 2010

SILVER

321,063 ozs deposited in the dealer’s (registered) inventory
296,745 ozs deposited in the customer (eligible) inventory
Total dealer inventory 50.87 Mozs
Total customer inventory 60.37 Mozs
Combined Total 111.24 Mozs

GOLD

3,000 ozs deposited in the dealers (registered) category
ZERO ozs withdrawn from the customer (eligible) category
Total dealer inventory 1.66 Mozs
Total customer inventory 8.34 Mozs
Combined Total 10.00 Mozs

There was only a paltry 3 Kozs of gold that moved into the dealer gold inventory. There were 0.32 Mozs of silver deposited in the dealer inventory and 0.3 Mozs deposited in the customer inventory. Strangely there was a massive 1,072,523 ozs internal “adjustment” where this metal was moved from the customers’ inventory to the dealer inventory. This is very bizarre because with 16 Mozs of delivery notices issued I would have expected metal to move from the dealer to the customers. Do the dealers need to lease silver to meet the March deliveries, or to do some window dressing so that their inventory doesn’t drop precipitously? Who knows? But it is very surprising to see silver move from customers to dealers when such a large amount of silver is standing for delivery.

There was 11 delivery notice issued in the MAR gold contract. The MAR gold contract total for the month is 360 notices or 36,000 ozs.

JPM issued 0 and stopped 1, and BNS issued 0 and stopped 10.

There were 152 delivery notices issued in the MAR silver contract. The total delivery notices for the month in silver stand at 3,287 or 16.4 Mozs. JPM issued 136 and stopped 25, and BNS issued 0 and stopped 82.

The contango in gold contracted. There is $0.2 of contango in gold MAR/APR and $1.5 of contango for MAR/JUN. This is razor thin. The contango MAR/APR in silver is 1.4 cents while for MAR/MAY contracts it is 2.4 cents.

The open interest in the MAR gold contract is 72 contracts, in silver it stands at 557 contracts.
Cheers
Adrian