Regarding the silver tightness dilemma. Here is some helpful input from a very knowledgeable Café member who knows the silver market very well:
Bill,
Allow me to explain a bit of the silver market, especially at NYMEX, that MAY help to explain why a few Arabs are having a hard time acquiring $10 million worth of silver, and not buying it at the NYMEX, and why the price may go down even in the face of such large buy orders.
Personally speaking, and I request that you keep my name anonymous for this (call me Mr. XYZ), I have difficulty placing orders for more than about $200,000 worth of silver to be filled at once from coin dealers. Currently, I have 4 such orders placed with 4 coin dealers, and perhaps only one of the dealers had the bullion in inventory. Thus, you'd probably hesitate to place a larger order with only one dealer, too! All the rest of the dealers had to order silver from someone else--and so, I spread my orders around. Therefore, I have first hand experience, in knowing that there is tightness in the physical silver bullion market, even in the last week with lower prices. But this tightness always exists, because the coin dealers do not keep, or do not have, that much capital in the form of silver bullion.
Next, the NYMEX has limits. If you buy more than 150 contracts, you are no longer anonymous. That is a limit of 750,000 ounces, or about $4.8 million, at $6.40/oz. So perhaps the Arabs are concerned about remaining anonymous.
There is another limit, a position limit, of 1500 contracts per person, which, of course is much larger than the $10 million of the Arabs you heard about, so that limit is not a concern in this $10 million order, but if the order is for physical bullion, it also does not apply.
A third limit is that a delivery limit can be invoked after delivery of 1,500,000 ounces total for all market participants in one month! Yes, that's right, if 1000 people demand a total of more than 1.5 million ounces of silver off of NYMEX, then NYMEX can halt all physical deliveries once that limit is reached! At $6.80/oz., that's just over $10 million, or precisely $10,200,000.
Now, personally speaking, I know I would have a hard time filling a $10 million order. And I would also not feel comfortable doing that volume of business all in one place, especially not at NYMEX, due to their position limits. I might do 1/3 of the order through NYMEX, but the rest I'd try to do through the coin dealers, and that would also be a lot of risk, and a lot of work.
Furthermore, at this time, you know that the bullion price is moved up and down by the excessive paper futures contracts. You can read Ted Butler for more on this theme. The paper contracts are generally in excess of 100,000 contracts, which far exceeds the silver at NYMEX, sometimes more than ten times as much in paper contracts as physical silver. Therefore, that is another reason why I would be very careful about buying silver with a futures contract at NYMEX, even in "small" amounts of only a few million dollars.
I hope that helps explain the silver market at this time.
Sincerely,
Mr. XYZ