The Silver Lining

The Silver Lining

By: Eric Sprott & David Franklin

No matter how complex our financial system becomes, the economic axiom of supply and demand will still apply. If the demand for an asset outstrips supply, the price of that asset will appreciate. The challenge in finding supply and demand imbalances in today’s market often lies in judging the quality of market data available – it frequently isn’t even close to being accurate. If the numbers don’t show the imbalances, it’s tough for investors to determine if the market price accurately reflects the market dynamics. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the market for silver.

While gold dominates the headlines, the silver market actually enjoys a superior fundamental supply/ demand story than that for gold, although you’d never know it based on the silver demand statistics from the major reporting services. As students of the precious metals markets we monitor the numerous metals reporting services very closely. According to those services, the silver market has enjoyed a stable supply/demand balance for almost ten years now. If that’s the case, why has the price of silver appreciated from $5 to $19/oz over that same time period? Is the reporting services’ data on the silver market truly reflective of silver’s underlying fundamentals?

Although there are several reporting services for silver market information, GFMS Ltd. and The Silver Institute are the most often quoted sources for silver market data. While they provide statistics for both silver supply and demand, it is their neglect of the “investment” demand category that we find problematic. GFMS and The Silver Institute use a category called “implied net investment” to capture the demand for physical silver from institutional and retail investors. The definition for “net investment” as defined by GFMS is “the residual from combining all other GFMS data on silver supply/demand... As such, it captures the net physical impact of all transactions not covered by the other supply/ demand variables.”1 In other words, it is not an observed figure. GFMS’s “implied net investment” number doesn’t include any observable demand for silver by ETF’s and other reporting entities such as hedge funds - it is merely a plug used to balance the supply data for GFMS’s and the Silver Institute’s reporting purposes.2 As we delved deeper into the silver market, this realization prompted us to calculate our own investment demand statistic.

We present our findings in Table A. While GFMS and The Silver Institute use an implied number, we calculated a real investment demand number using a handful of ETF’s and two other large private investors, one of which is our own firm. Our demand metric is by no means complete or exhaustive - we only used seven sources of reported investment demand, and yet from our informal and incomplete survey we found that GFMS and The Silver Institute had underreported silver investment demand by at least 225 million ounces! This shortfall doesn’t consider any other investors that may have bought silver over the past year, so real demand for silver could be multiple times higher.

June 2010

Table A

Given its seemingly evident market imbalances, you might wonder why silver hasn’t performed better over the last year. The answer, we believe, lies in the way silver is priced. The silver spot price is dictated by paper contracts that trade on the COMEX exchange in New York. Paper contracts can be purchased “long” or sold “short”. If more participants sell “short” than purchase “long”, the paper market price for silver will decline. Often these contracts have little to no relationship with actual physical silver, and yet they are the most influential contract in determining silver’s physical spot price. Go figure.

In studying the silver market we owe a great debt to the work of silver analyst, Ted Butler. Mr. Butler has been writing about the silver market for fifteen years and has done much to inform investors about the reality of silver’s physical fundamentals. Butler provides some insight into the “short” positions that exist in silver today, highlighting the fact that the eight largest silver traders currently hold a net short position of over 66,000 contracts, representing more than 330 million ounces of silver.11 This means that the eight largest COMEX traders are net short the equivalent of 48.5% of the world’s total annual silver mine production of 680.9 million ounces. None of these traders are in the silver business by the way – they’re all financial institutions. In addition, the COMEX silver short position held by the eight largest traders on May 3, 2010, represented 33% of total world silver bullion inventory,

Holder

Silver Holdings in Oz as of December 31, 2009

iShares Silver Trust 3

305,205,951

Central Fund of Canada 4

67,322,479

Zürcher Kantonalbank (ZKB) Silver ETF 5

59,370,000

Sprott Asset Management 6

41,838,539

ETFS - Silver UK 7

23,370,555

GoldMoney 8

20,000,000

Claymore Silver Bullion Trust 9

2,476,400

TOTAL Holdings

519,583,924

Aggregate Implied Investment Demand (2000 to 2009)10

293,800,000

Missing Investment Demand

225,783,924

Real investment Demand for Silver

Source: Sprott Asset Management

June 2010

estimated by Butler to be approximately one billion ounces. There is no real comparison with gold, as the 24.5 million ounce concentrated net short position held by the eight largest traders represents a mere 1.2% of the 2 billion+ ounces of world gold bullion inventory as reported by the World Gold Council.12 So in comparison to total world bullion inventories, the concentrated short position in silver is 27 times larger than that for gold. In every comparison possible, the short position in COMEX silver contracts is off the charts, and if you think the short positions sound potentially disruptive, you’re not alone. In September 2008 the CFTC confirmed that its Division of Enforcement has been investigating complaints of misconduct in the silver market. This investigation is ongoing and we look forward to its resolution.13

Because we believe the demand for precious metals will continue to increase in this environment, we’re always interested to know the total supply available in today’s physical bullion market. According to the best estimates from the USGS and current mining statistics, approximately 46 billion ounces of silver have been mined since the dawn of civilization.14 In comparison, approximately 5 billion ounces of gold have been mined throughout history.15 Reading this, a casual observer might conclude that gold is currently justified in being worth more than silver based on its relative scarcity. But the current price discrepancy ($1,250/oz gold vs $19/oz silver) is misleading.