Looking over the issues (sell) and stops (buy) reports for comex since 2010 points to some interesting behavior. If you're not familiar with the report, here is a link to the most recent data:
https://www.cmegroup.com/delivery_reports/MetalsIssuesAndStopsYTDReport.pdf
I obtained most of the old data from the Wayback Machine and WSS ape u/Exploring_Finance filled in the gaps.
The data is the "deliveries", or sales and purchases, of settlements for futures trades on comex. I've been looking at gold and silver. The data tallies metal "deliveries" not paper trades. At a future date I'll get more descriptive about the data. For now, I want to flag the recent apparent absence of industrial, refining or mining silver sellers.
Over the years there are three firms who have a high ratio of sales to buys. I'm basing that on the huge sales volumes relative to purchases. For example, Stonex Financial's customer account has sold 9 times more metal than bought and the net of sales less purchases is 125 million oz. That's a lopsided trade balance so they likely have a huge metal seller as an account owner. The other two anomalies are ABN AMRO Clearing and Jefferies LLC.
The plot below shows the net cumulative oz purchased since 2010 for those firms:
https://preview.redd.it/11zedp0k9x981.png?width=941&format=png&auto=webp&s=4dd08e7e31277d724c7b41a223447c95926419ab
I'm plotting the cumulative values so that the monthly spikes are smoothed. Much of the metal is sold in the 5 active months of each year although some is sold during the inactive months. This large month to month fluctuation causes the data to present as seemingly random spikes which masks trends. The cumulative values effectively smooth the data.
For now, just focus on Stonex, ABN Amro and Jefferies. Notice the following:
- Each of the trajectories are a straight line with occasional slope change. An increased slope would mean the monthly average sales rate is increased or versa vice. A slope change could mean that another customer account was opened or closed OR the original seller changed their average monthly sales volume.
- Also notice that there are times where sales abruptly start or stop. This likely means that an industrial client opened an account or closed an account. The opening or closings of accounts do not synchronize so it doesn't appear that a big seller just moved his account.
- Many of t
