Digging into the COT figures
After last year’s US government shutdown, commitment of traders’ statistics are now fully updated. They make interesting reading, particularly in the context of Dow theory.
In the last year, gold and silver rose above nearly everyone’s expectations. Gold’s rise was more orderly than silver’s which in 2026 Q4 frequently went into backwardation between spot and futures, and lease rates have remained elevated. In this analysis, we start with silver.
Silver
Much has been written about silver in recent months. But there is a mystery: with the trend so obviously for higher prices, why haven’t speculators joined in? It should be meat and drink for aggressive hedge funds. On Comex they have been absent, with managed money (hedge funds) having 29,100 long contracts against an average over the last twenty years of 43,520:
These trend-chasers and pairs-traders, which would normally be expected to have closer to 100,000 long contracts when pursuing a silver bull market have only 30% of that. Meanwhile the swaps who are market makers and bullion bank trading desks are short 57,267 contracts against a long-term average position of 38,150:
