COMEX Warehouse Stocks July 30, 2010

SILVER

455,553 ozs withdrawn from the dealer’s (registered) inventory
29 ozs deposited in the customer (eligible) inventory
Total dealer inventory 51.97 Mozs
Total customer inventory 58.12 Mozs
Combined Total 110.09 Mozs

GOLD

ZERO ozs withdrawn from the dealers (registered) category
29,366 ozs deposited in the customer (eligible) category
Total dealer inventory 2.95 Mozs
Total customer inventory 8.10 Mozs
Combined Total 11.05 Mozs

There was a sizeable withdrawal of gold from the customer inventory of 29,366 ozs but the show stopper was a massive 367,716 ozs of gold that moved from the customer inventory to the dealer inventory by means of an internal adjustment. This is almost exactly equal to the delivery notices issued today. Interestingly JPM issued almost all the delivery notices today. The notices issued by JPM represent 368,500 ozs of gold which is very close to the amount of gold transferred. It will be interesting to see if this is withdrawn from the Comex. There were 0.46 Mozs of silver that were withdrawn from the customer inventory.

There were 3,716 delivery notices issued in the AUG gold contract. The AUG gold delivery notice total for the month is 3,716 notices or 371,600 ozs.

JPM issues 3,685 and stopped 501, HSBC issued none and stopped 2,066 while BNS issued none and stopped 327.

There was 1 delivery notice issued in the AUG silver contract. The total delivery notices for the month in silver stand at 1 or 5,000 ozs.

The final amount of delivery notices issued in silver for the JUL contract was 12 Mozs and just 89,400 ozs in gold.

The Open Interest in the AUG gold contract stood at 8,707 yesterday so it appears that 870,700 ozs are standing for delivery in AUG or 29% of the dealer inventory.

At the close SEP gold was 20 cents in backwardation with respect to AUG and lease rates across the spectrum of maturities all went positive. This is an intriguing development that could be a sign of some real stress in the physical market. This bears watching closely.
Cheers
Adrian