I'm Charlotte Mloud with investingnews.com and here today with me is Jeffrey Christian, managing partner at CPM Group. Thank you so much for being here. Great to have you. >> It's always a pleasure to catch up with you. >> Yes, in person this time. Yes. So nice. We're here at PDAC. We made it to We're We're nearly done day two, I think. So, I wanted to start by asking you your thoughts on sentiment so far at the conference, themes that you've been noticing. >> Well, I've really been tied up in a lot


of conf uh one-on-one meetings with clients, so I haven't necessarily gotten the gist, but you know, with our silver reception last night, we saw about 600 people. And you know there's a tremendous amount of happiness and bullishness not just about gold and silver but I think about mining and metals in general. Uh but there's a tremendous amount of concern because a prices have risen so high people are not quite sure how sustainable some of that increase is and the increased volatility


in prices has really caused issues away from the price. You know, there's a lot of issues for mining companies, but really, you know, smelters, refiners, and fabricators and dealers of precious metals, investment products. With the high price and the high volatility and the high demand and the high flow of silver being sold back by investors, there's a lot of issues about credit being dried up and tied up and and credit availability is a real issue for those companies that are involved in the


physical metal markets. >> Okay, we [clears throat] have a lot to unpack there. So, we'll we'll do our best today. Maybe we start with the price action. So we last spoke around the end of December. A lot has happened since then in terms of the prices. We saw the big runup in gold and silver toward the end of January and then the correction. And you're right, I think a lot of people saw that as an opportunity, but that's created nervousness as well because gold and silver are known for well maybe not


silver, but gold is known for being stable and a safe haven. So to see that price action is a little concerning. So what what was going on there? What was driving that price activity and where do you see it going? >> Well, there's several things. I mean, we had seen a surge and a a noticeable increase in demand for gold from investors really starting at the end of August of 2025 with the Fed uh conference in Wyoming and you saw gold investors buying more gold and the price went sharply higher from then into


December. December and January saw much higher prices. A big part of what you saw with the runup in January and the selloff at the end of January was the role of the COMX active February gold contract. You had very high open interest going into January and that was rolled forward from February into April contracts. By the end of January, that was done. And that took out a tremendous I mean, hundreds of millions of ounces of gold futures contracts that had been bought back in the February contract.


200 million ounces or more. You know, that was a lot of the demand that drove the price up. Once it's over, the price came back up. In addition to that, you saw tremendous amounts of gold bought by investors in ETFs. So, these are not necessarily traditional physical gold investors. These are people who are watching the gold price rise since August saying, "I got to get a piece of that." And the easiest way for somebody to do that if they don't have a physical or futures account is to buy an ETF


because those you can trade through your shop uh stock uh market broker account. So you saw a tremendous amount of gold being bought by investors in January. Interestingly enough, while investors were selling their silver ETFs. >> Okay. Very interesting. So, that explains what we had going on during the last month or so in January. So, now we're we made it into March. How how do you see gold and silver going moving forward? Because we had that big correction. Prices have have come back


and I think that happened more quickly than people expected. >> Right. Well, February was the active COMX gold futures contract. March was the active silver one. So over the course of February, you saw the same mechanics of hundreds of millions of ounces of silver futures bought back in the March and then sold into May. That helped propel the silver price to $121 an ounce. In addition to that, a lot of the investors who had been buying silver and then sold it in January when the price came off sharply, they took that


as a buying opportunity and they started buying physical metal and ETFs. So you saw increased investment demand and then you had any number of exogenous variables, you know, economic and political developments. So Friday, you know, Friday the price of gold had risen to $5,200 some odd dollars and silver had risen to like $92. We had thought that gold could rise to 5,400 in in by the end of February and gold to 100. And we we told our clients on f on Friday, okay, 92 might be the top and we might


see some lower prices on Monday and and silver gold only got to 40 5200. It didn't go to 5,400. Maybe that's the top. Maybe we should lighten up. Saturday morning, everything changed. We came back to our clients on Saturday and said $5,498. We saw $100 silver today. We saw $5,400 overnight for gold. And gold's still up about $60, but silver's off about $8 or so. So, we wouldn't be surprised to see some softness in the prices this week. But longer term, all of those economic and political conditions that are the


increased risk and the increased uncertainty and the increased volatility, they're all in place still, that's probably going to mean higher gold and silver prices for the foreseeable future. >> Okay. And just to add some context on this past weekend's event, we're talking on Monday, March 2nd, so things are still really developing. I think it's useful to at least talk briefly about how gold and silver tend to perform when we see these types of geopolitical turmoil events unfold. I think so


usually we get that spike upward and then that dissipates. >> It's interesting because we've always had this rubric political and economic events that are important to gold are important to gold. And we say that because people say, "Well, you know, gold doesn't seem to be responding." Like when when the Argentines took over the Faulland Islands, the gold price didn't rise. I said, "Well, the Faulland Islands are not important to gold." But Dubai and the entire GCC region, Iran, the the


Gulf uh cooperation council countries that is very important to gold. The oil there is important to gold. Those are important gold and silver markets. Uh so this is something that's very important to gold and silver and it's very destabilizing to the global economy and the global political environment. It marks an increase in the hegemonic behavior of the US government. You know we had a situation when when Iraq attacked Kuwait. We put together a coalition of a couple dozen countries when two weeks ago the EU and the UK


said you may not use our bases if you're going to attack Iran. And we attacked Iran anyway. So this was a unilateral action that basically said we don't care what our traditional allies think. This is what we're doing. >> Very interesting situation. So we'll be watching that unfold. And on that note, I want to go back to volatility and the increased volatility we're seeing not just in silver but also in gold. I think people are used to seeing it as more stable. So in this bull market that


we're in right now, do we need to expect more volatility for gold as well? >> I think that you will at least you know uh at least for the next quarter or two. Our view is that you might get to a point where you sort of see a plateauing of gold and silver prices uh staying high preparing a base for another upward move. But in that kind of environment the volatility could contract. You have to understand that with the high prices and the high volatility that really puts a constraint as I said earlier on the


flow of physical metal through the market and that constraint will slow the demand and increase uh in price. >> Well, let's let's talk about that then because I think it's quite complex. People probably don't understand everything that's at play there. So that could act as a slowing influence on the price because of what's going on with the refineries etc. Can you explain right >> how that works? >> Well, there are several things and it starts with the retail dealers and the


wholesale dealers who sell precious metals to investors and really for the last several years you've seen heavy sales of silver back into the dealer market by investors who are taking advantage of higher silver prices. you know, they had bought at earlier prices. The price went over $30, the price went over $40, the price went over $50, and they were taking advantage of that. But when the price went from $50 to $121, and even before that, you in the summer of last year, you saw a tremendous


amount of silver being sold by investors to take profits of prices at at the that time. And then when you saw the price surge in December and January, you saw even more that metal. Then what you had a situation where outside of India, in India, investors were holding on to their metal and not selling. But in other parts of the world, including North America and Europe, you saw investors selling a lot of silver and some gold. And that metal then backed up and the the retail investors, the in retail dealers didn't have the credit


availability to continue to buy stuff. You know, they counted all their careers on people buying more precious metals than were selling them back. So they'd always have money from the buyers to pay for the metal that others were selling back. In the recent months, you've seen more selling. So all of a sudden these guys are running out of cash. They need to borrow more money and their banks are saying you you've got a market that's extremely volatile. The prices are very high. It's extremely uncertain. It's


overrun with a lot of scam artists and and and people who just lie. [laughter] You know, I can't I can't justify giving you more credit. So then they have to they can't sit on those inventories. They can sit on the maple leafs and eagles, but they can't sit on the rounds and the kilo bars and the 10 oz bars and 100 oz bars. So, they have to sell them to the wholesalers. They have the same credit constraints. So, they have to sell them to the refiners. The refiners sell to bullion dealers and bullion


banks who can only buy good delivery thousand ounce bars. So they have to melt that stuff down and cast it into good delivery bars which takes time and it ties up the refinery. So then the the traditional refinery feed you know old jewelry, old scrap uh sputtering target uh koopalas and stuff like that that they normally refine gets backed up. So you've had this backup and financial constraints in the flow of metal from investors through retail and then wholesale dealers to the refiners. >> I think that's I've heard it explained


in different ways that really helps a lot the way that you lay it out. And so how how does this resolve? This does this resolve with lower prices for the metals? it resolves with a a reduction in the reflow of metal and that gives the refiners a chance to catch up. I mean, we saw this. We've seen it in 1980. We saw it in 1987. [snorts] We saw it in 2011, 2012, 2013. We've seen this before. And it just, you know, you have this flood of material that backs up the refineries and it takes a


few months unless the flow continues. Once the flow of sales slows, then you can start working through the the material that's been sold. >> Okay. >> Yeah, >> that helps a lot as well. And so this is a lot of selling in the west and I wanted to talk a little bit about the the global nature of the gold and silver markets because I've been hearing so much about China's increasing role in the market and in pricing as well as the eastern world in general. What would your comments on that be? China has been


very important to gold and silver for years and a lot of what I'm hearing is is not accurate. Okay? You know, the Chinese gold market, China is the largest mining company country. China is the largest refiner, gold refining country. China is the largest gold market for investment products and investment demand. And it has been the case. And China has a policy. The gold in China stays in China. So it's been a very active market in the silver market. It's also a very large producer. It's


one of the largest. It's not I don't think it is the largest re mining country yet. It produces a lot of silver from domestic mines from domestic scrap and from imported concentrates base metals concentrates gold copper lead zinc concentrates that they import. They refine they smelt it and refine it. They keep the copper, lead and zinc and then they have excess silver. So they're very important in the silver market. There has been a large changeover in the staffing of the Chinese government which


is part of the political situation going on in China. And that has apparently led to a hiccup in granting the 2-year export licenses for silver. And so you've had a situation in January and February where companies, refiners and bullion banks, bullion dealers in China that had exported silver under two-year licenses that expired at the end of December have been waiting for new export licenses. That's just a mechanical thing and it has to do with the political changeovers in China. But it's taken it's given an opportunity for


the huers in the western silver market to say, "Oh, China's withholding their silver." China's not withholding their silver. China is struggling to get its new export license people up to speed as to what they need to do. >> Okay. And do we do we know if that has a point in time that it resolves? We just have to wait a little longer. >> It appears to be work resolving itself now. >> Okay. Okay. So that's one misconception that we can talk about there. There's a


lot going on in the silver market that we should probably go over. The point that I've been talking to people with quite a bit here is the CME Group issue that we had last week at this point and that follows the one that happened I believe around American Thanksgiving. We might have already talked about that one the last time we spoke, but I wondered if you could unpack that. There's a lot of concern about what that meant. Yeah, there's a lot of theories that it was something nefarious. The reality is that


precious metals and copper and aluminum um are probably like less than 5% of the CME group's turnover and have been neglected as a backwater. You know it precious metals and commodities in general have you know when I started in the business 50 years ago commodities were the major products of futures markets today financial futures currencies stock indices and other financial assets represent 95 plus% of the trading volume. So precious metals don't get advertising dollars and they don't get tech support dollars and


from what we can tell it's a matter of underinvestment. If you go back I don't know hold don't hold me to it. Let's say we go back 30 35 years ago. Comx did not belong to Nyx and Comx and NX did not belong to the CME group and COMX which was gold and silver and copper was not investing in new technologies and got to a point where it had a problem in 1987 um and ultimately was bought by NYX because Nyx had created the oil futures. It had the money to computerize in the 80s and so it bought COMX. CME which had


focused on financial futures was a bigger BM and it absorbed both of them. But the reality is that the metals markets futures markets have been the neglected stepchildren. They're the they're they're the the ancestors, you know, and I hate to say it, you know, but you just don't see the the futures market, the CME group spending the attention, including investing in new technologies and upgrading the existing technology that they should and they don't. You know, you have to you have to be a, you


know, a coldhearted capitalist and say that's not where they're making their money. So the gold and silver markets, metalist markets, maybe we're not as big a deal as as we [laughter] think we are. >> Definitely not. >> All right. I was wondering, so regardless, you know, people are thinking something nefarious is going on there. Regardless of that, if we set that aside, there have been these two issues. Does that make entities less likely to want to trade on the COMX? they want to take their business


elsewhere perhaps with this going on. >> I think the first impulse is to say get your house in order. I mean Comx and NX have the liquidity that other exchanges around the world just have not been able to develop and you know people people keep having all of these inaccurate comments about ComX versus Shanghai prices. The Shanghai Futures Exchange is a futures exchange that's designed for institutional investors, buyside and sellside financial institutions in China. Most of the physical silver goes through the Huatong


silver exchange. Most of the silver physical silver goes through the silver Shanghai gold exchange. Shanghai futures market is a professional market for Chinese institutions. The ComX and NYX are globally traded including Chinese institutions, right? People around the world trade on the COMX and it's got the volume and the liquidity. So the first impulse I think of ComX users is please get your system fixed because there really isn't somebody that we can turn to >> that has that kind of liquidity if you


want. It's very similar to the US dollar. You know the world is a flooded with dollars to the point where there's nothing that you can really say well let's shift to euros. You know, if you shifted 10% of the dollar holdings on the world basis to the euro, European inflation would skyrocket because it'd be such a massive growth in liquidity, you know. So that's why the dollar has this hegemonic, if I may use that term again, uh control on the currency market, you know, [clears throat]


as a Polish central banker said to me 45 years ago, if you owe a bank enough, you own it. If you owe the world enough, you own it. That's the way the US government thinks about the dollar. And in a similar microcosm, the COMX and NAX are the places where the the liquidity, you know, and it would be a lot easier to fix them than it would be to try to create a replacement someplace else. >> So there's there's no good equivalent. >> No. >> Very interesting. Thank you for


explaining that as well. And on on this note, there's been surrounding all this CME group issues that people have been talking about. There's concerns about the amount of people or entities standing for delivery of metal and can that be done and I think that's resulted in all these concerns about a default on the COMX. So maybe you help us unpack that as well. >> Well, yeah, it's very funny because well, it's not an issue. Um, one of the things people don't seem to


understand that when you take delivery on the COMX, you're taking delivery of depository receipts. And a lot of companies for a variety of reasons will take delivery of the comm depository receipts, see what they're getting, and if they don't like the brand, they'll redeliver it the next day. And you don't have to pay 100% if you redeliver within 24 hours. So when you look at say 70 million ounces of deliveries in a given contract month, it's quite possible that the actual


volume included was about 35 million ounces because a lot of that stuff gets redelivered and it gets redelivered again. You know, it's depository receipts. So then you say, okay, so what's the relationship between the deliveries of depository receipts and warehouse deliveries where the metals actually coming out of the warehouses and there really isn't a good correlation. Now if you go back to September, Comx silver inventories were 530 million ounces. That was a record. And let me put that record in kind. This is not


like, oh well, you know, he's got one more home run than Hank Aaron. This is a record where the typical volumes over several decades until a couple years ago were like a 100 to 150 million ounces. And now you have 530 million ounces. Why did you have 530 million ounces in September of 2025? Because you had COVID lockdown. You had a shift to COMX from other non-exchange traded things that didn't have clearing houses that started back in 2008 2009 when the OTC markets locked up during the


financial crisis and people could trade on the co on on futures exchanges because they had clearing houses and that that has caused that. But then you had co then you had people just sort of saying okay if I have physical silver I'm a trading company I have physical silver I am more likely to find a buyer in North America than I am in Europe either a industrial user or a investor. So it behooves me to have my inventories in New York rather than London or Zurich. So you saw that shift. Then we


had this thing called Donald Trump who came along and you had all these people saying, "Oh my god, he's talking tariffs on everything. What if he puts tariffs on silver?" So you had this flood of silver coming out of London going and elsewhere going into New York and it went from 150 to 300 to 530 million ounces. By which time Trump said, "I'm not going to put tariffs on silver." Meanwhile, you had all these guys who love to be spurious and accurate saying, "Oh my god, London's running out of


silver, right?" Well, as London inventories of deliverable silver reduced, the London price rose relative to New York to the point where not only could you ship, you could buy in New York and sell in London and ship it back, you could buy in New York and fly it back to London profitably. So you had the situation peaking in September. You had the Fed saying we're probably going to be lowering interest rates more than we thought because the US economy is looking weaker than we thought. So a


maybe investment demand and fabrication demand for silver is not going to be as strong in North America as we it has been. And I can make money by moving the stuff back to London. And Trump just said he's not going to put tariffs. So you had Comx inventories fall from 530 million ounces to 370 million 380 million ounces. And 380 million ounces is still three times what the traditional level is. And again, the spurious ones say, "Oh my god, you've never seen ComX silver inventories fall 150 million


ounces in just five months." And the answer is, of course, you haven't because it's never been that high. You know, >> if you only have 150 million ounces, you can't lose 150 million ounces, despite what they say. >> So, we have to take a step back to understand this. >> Huh? We have to take a step way back to understand this. Yes. Yes. >> Okay. That is really helpful, I think, in understanding the flows in the silver market. Unfortunately, we have to wrap


it up here for now. I'm going to send you back out onto the show floor unless you had any final thoughts. Uh you know our final thoughts are look we have been saying for 25 years that the world economic and political system was going to be much more treacherous going forward. Not just for one or two years like we've seen from 1947 till 2000 but for decades. And for the last 25 years that's been the case. And that has caused investors to buy more gold and silver than ever before. And in 2000, we


said it's going to start and it's going to go and it's going to continue for decades. And we look at the world right now and we see a world where the risks and uncertainties are greater now than at any time since Pearl Harbor, December 1941. You know, the war went on for a few more years, but after Pearl Harbor, everyone knew who would win. Yeah, the risks and uncertainties are greater now than ever before since 1941. And I don't necessarily see how they get resolved. We have different scenarios that we use


at CPM Group, but most of those scenarios involve investors saying continuing to say for many years, I think I want to have more of my wealth in gold and silver. So we see gold and silver prices staying high and moving higher until you see a reduction in political and economic risks. >> Okay, well that is certainly a way to sum it up. Thank you so much for coming on to go over all these different questions. It's always helpful. >> Thank you for having us. It's always a pleasure.


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>> Amazing. And once again, I'm Charlotte Mloud with investingnews.com and this is Jeffrey Christian with CPM Group.