Silver has new sponsorship. We are starting to see new funds coming into silver. Part of it has to do with the fact that a lot of traders who follow gold and silver think the silver/gold ratio was out of kilter.
Silver had been less lively than gold (before Wednesday), and now it's doing a pretty good job of a catch-up.
Now you have momentum players and volatility players being attracted into the market.
Funds are buying gold because they notice the decoupling from the euro and the decoupling from the energy market.
Gold is a safe haven. We have major political problems in Iran and energy problems in Nigeria.
Palladium and platinum are incredibly robust. There are questions about Russia's deliveries -- no one knows what Russia means.
Recently, funds who were selling oil also were selling the metals, but then everything seemed to change. Investors see that there are whiffs of inflation out there.
We continue to climb in spite of the stock-market rise, all helped by the possibility that the Fed may no longer be continuing its raise (in interest rates). We are waiting to see if in fact that will happen.
We have a good rally going on because of what's going on in Saudi Arabia. It is Friday and nobody wants to be short the gold over the weekend, so up go all the metals.
There also is a lot of option-related buying because everything is in the money now.
There doesn't seem to be an end to the reasons why people want to keep moving into the gold.
They actually ran a very good, under CFTC oversight and under exchange oversight, futures business, where all customers were always properly margined.
It was triggered by the dollar, the yen, and of course the idea of $70 crude. (Higher) oil didn't help the stock market, so investors were looking for another place to put their money and they seem to be looking at the metals.
It was an unbelievable run-up. It was done pretty orderly.
It seems that general commodity highs are adding purchasing power to momentum players' funds, so they are increasing positions in the metals.
Every time we've had a major pullback, it's been what people would call an opportunity to buy on a dip, You're getting some bargain-hunting in silver and you're getting some bottom-picking in gold.
The large funds are long metals of every class and there's been general selling today, which touched off stop-loss orders below the market.
The inverted yield curve, which sent the stock market reeling yesterday, made gold one of the few safe havens.
The market keeps bouncing back and, once we climbed back above $550, more investors came back in.