Quick Look At Futures Positioning
Following is a quick snapshot of the latest futures positioning data from the CFTC. These are positions for the large commercial hedgers that we show in the interactive versions of the charts on the site.
The most notable change was in silver, where hedgers are now holding their most aggressive short positions since 2008. This is not always useful - it gave a bad warning sign in 2010 - but overall tends to be accurate. When commercials are heavily short a commodity in a downtrend, it has most often had difficulty sustaining higher prices, and they've been more aggressively shorting silver on each rally attempt over the past few years. As always, this could be misleading but it looks like the risk on silver just went up.