Gold Price Sets Another New Record, Silver Drops Under $35, & EFP Premiums Spike Again

There was a bit of a divergence in the gold and silver pricing today to finish out the week, with the gold futures continuing to rally and finishing the week at $3,126, while silver futures sold off in the afternoon to just under $35.

The gold futures set new daily, 52 week, and all-time record highs this week at $3,126.

And below you can see the silver futures begin their selloff at 9:45 AM, before recovering slightly right at the end of the day.

The daily and 52 week highs were set around 2:30 AM eastern time at $35.49, although of course we remain well off the 1980 and 2011 highs in the $49-50 range.

However if you’re inclined to look under the hood at some of the events that have been driving this most recent portion of the rally, there was no shortage of those, with COMEX, EFP, and economic issues all popping up in the past few days. And we’re also now less than a week away from the beginning of the ‘reciprocal tariffs’ as well.

Michael Lynch, who does a great blog regarding the delivery cycles on the COMEX published his latest piece titled “COMEX silver's situation is precarious as the largest short struggles to deliver metal,” that included the following comments:

• The naked short on the March silver contract is the HSBC “customer” account.

• HSBC has likely burned all their registered inventory and is up against the wall on these last days of the contract.

• What does this mean? Comex’s largest silver short is out of metal. This account was 25% of the total short volume on this near record contract … and they don’t have metal to deliver. At some point this charade will unravel.

I know you’ve also heard plenty about the EFP issues in the gold and silver markets over the past few months, but those are back too.

Here you can see an approximation of the gold and silver EFP spreads, with the investing.com feeds showing the gold EFP up to $42, while silver is up to 87 cents.

Then mix in that if you subscribe to the view that stock market selloffs are a net positive for gold and silver prices (which I think is generally, although not always the case), then the latest GDPNow forecast would at least suggest that there could be more upside for the precious metals ahead. As the Atlanta Fed’s forecast for real GDP growth in the first quarter of 2025 came in at -2.8% today, down from -1.8% on March 26.

Lastly, in an ‘indication’ of potential good news, we’ve slowly seen some trickling out of announcements towards a ‘calming’ of the conflict in Ukraine, that’s hopefully leading towards a resolution, and conclusion to the conflict.

The impact a resolution would have on the gold and silver markets is worthy of discussion another time. But just simply from the standpoint that any time a war may potentially be coming to an end, that’s always a positive step for the health of the world.

So with that said, hopefully you enjoyed another week of gold and silver rallying, and if you’re fortunate enough to be in an area that’s safe and free of conflict, find a time to appreciate that at some point this weekend.

Sincerely,
Chris Marcus