For years, gold bugs and silver truthers have railed that deep-pocketed, powerful forces have been manipulating both metal markets, using ‘futures’ to drive the prices up or down according to their will.
Their jeremiad gained legitimacy last September, when JP Morgan Chase & Co. agreed to pay US$920 million and admitted wrongdoing to settle a probe launched by multiple U.S. federal agencies into the manipulation of the futures market for precious metals.
On Monday, silver prices surged 11 per cent, the most in more than a decade as those concerns about market manipulation drew attention from investors on the social media site Reddit, some of whom hope to use their collective financial power to punish silver naysayers.
Last month, investors on Reddit’s WallStreetBets group roiled financial markets when they poured money into a few moribund stocks, most notably GameStop Corp., a Dallas-based videogame retailer whose share price rocketed up 1,600 per cent in the past few weeks.
The unexpected surge caused big losses for hedge funds that had been ‘shorting’ or betting that GameStop’s share price would decline.
For the rest of this article: https://financialpost.com/commodities/mining/canadian-silver-stocks-soar-and-bars-and-coins-fly-off-the-shelves-as-reddit-traders-jump-on-silversqueeze?video_autoplay=true