美銀（BAC）的，大摩（MS）的小摩（摩根大通）和黑石（BLR）“逆勢“買白銀 ETF的-薩爾瓦多，成了它目前最大的4個股東。說明什麼？
Silver ETF gets help from its friends
This fund's 4 largest holders support the metal's price by buying the physical commodity when prices fall.
By TheStreet Staff on Wed, Jun 8, 2011 12:56 PM
By Dan Dicker, TheStreet
Silver and BlackRock's silver ETF, iShares Silver Trust ETF (SLV), have been the target of some wild rumors in the past several months.
The crazy stories have run the gamut around the financial blogosphere. One has JPMorgan (JPM) as a puppet of the Federal Reserve, establishing a huge proprietary bet against silver designed to pressure the dollar and reduce costs of monetary easing. Others have BlackRock (BLK) unable to satisfy its share demand with real silver stockpiles. Many observers claim that legitimate storage for the metal doesn't come anywhere near the almost 11,400 tons of physical silver that the trust reported holding at its extremes in late April of this year.
I don't need to go anywhere near those rumors. The facts about SLV alone are enough to make a great case for the manipulating effects of the ETF on the price of silver and the strong positives those manipulations can deliver to an investor who doesn't mind being part of a grand plan -- as long as it's a profitable one.
As investor interest increases, sending shares of the trust higher, BlackRock continues to issue more shares, using the extra cash to buy and stockpile physical silver ingots. The speed with which it will issue shares and increase its physical holdings is dependent solely on how fast the differential moves between the actual price of physically traded silver and SLV's share price.
In fund-speak, this is called tracking the net asset value, or NAV, of the fund. If the NAV tracks too high to spot prices, shares go out to satisfy demand for the fund.
And appetites for SLV have been stunning. Since its inception in 2006 and initial stockpiling of 650 tons, SLV reached its 11,400-ton peak just over a month ago, an amount that represents almost half of all the silver being globally mined in a single year. Of course, this institutional hoarding system was a tremendous added influence to the price of silver, which recently peaked at more than $48 an ounce on April 29.
But what about the past month? With silver's price losing more than $10 an ounce, shouldn't SLV be working in reverse? If shares are normally issued as appetite for silver increases, shouldn't the number of shares and the stockpiled amount of silver decrease as the retail and institutional investor sell out?
It should and it is, but only to a certain degree. The mechanism of SLV implies that the fund would never need to sell any of its physical holdings, as long as the cash price keeps up with the share price -- or to put it in fund-speak again, if the NAV doesn't become too discounted.
So as long as appetite for the fund keeps relatively steady even as silver prices decline, the trust can continue to hold the enormous tonnage they've accumulated. That's good for long-term holders and the managers, of course, because silver prices are buoyed as hoarded stockpiles increase.
Recently, though, retail and institutional appetite did take a dip. But as silver prices swooned, other buyers have come in to take up much of the slack of the share selling that came with it.
But who were those buyers? Conspiracy advocates around the blogosphere won't be surprised to learn it's been the investment banks and trust managers themselves -- the sales force of the fund.
As evidenced by the 13F Edgar filings, SLV's four largest holders have now shifted hands from large institutional funds and into the hands of Bank of America (BAC), Morgan Stanley (MS), JPMorgan and Blackrock.
Besides using cheap funds from the discount window to make these purchases courtesy of Uncle Sam, they also manage to do much of their buying at a discount to NAV, in essence grabbing an immediate advantage compared to spot metal prices. It's become a tidy game.
And as retail and institutional interest in silver comes back, these banks and investment firms are well-placed to resell their accumulated shares at their leisure, above NAV and directly through their own sales teams inside their supposed Chinese walls.
It might sound shady, but it's all entirely legal.
The bottom line for the retail investor is that the trust managers and bank sales teams now have organic support from the proprietary desks at their own investment banks -- and can almost assure that silver won't get decimated in a deeper commodity pullback.
I hate to do it -- I don't like the system and it ought to be forbidden -- but silver and SLV look like a one-way street you can't afford not to be pointed down.
At the time of publication, Dicker had no positions in the securities mentioned in this article.
於此同時：白銀持倉報告顯示：
當然，白銀前期跌幅過大，有傷人氣。雖然目前初步可能見底，但不排除是個大平底鍋的可能，即在底部會震盪一陣子，尤其是夏季是黃金的淡季，白銀首飾方面也是淡季，要到8月下旬開始，才進入傳統的旺季採購。這期間低位進入都是可以的，但短期不要指望漲幅能有多大，除非大本的QE3或者希臘的債務問題憋不住了夏天就出來。否則大的漲勢估計還是在秋天。
最後說一句，說賣了索羅斯 SPDR來的股份，因而說明他不看好黃金的，先去查查，人家是3月31日之前賣的，那時的金價和元旦時差不多，與後來4個月的漲幅無關。如果他認為3月份的金價高估有泡沫而賣出，為何一月份不早出手呢？反正價格也差不多。而且這個黃金 ETF基金SPDR來，持有股份超過10萬股的（即1萬盎司），可以要求實物交割，即不是賣出股份換美元，而是直接換取實物。這兩種拋出，其實際意義和對黃金後市的看法是大相徑庭的。同時索羅斯買礦業的黃金股，就已經說明不少問題了。
