The Metals: Gold fell in Asia and London to see a loss of $8.50 at as low as $1150.20 by about 8:35AM EST, but it then rallied back higher for most of the rest of trade in New York and ended near it late session high of $1161.35 with a gain of 0.13%. Silver dropped over 1% to as low as $18.20 before it also climbed back higher and ended unchanged on the day. Euro gold rose to about €855, platinum lost $5 to $1717.50, and copper fell slightly to about $3.60. Gold and silver equities remained near unchanged for most of the morning, but they then fell to see over 1% losses by early afternoon and remained near that level into the close. Oil fell as the U.S. dollar index and treasuries rose on mixed economic data and renewed worries over Greece that sent the euro lower. The Dow, Nasdaq, and S&P found slight gains as mixed economic data was overcome by decent earnings reports. Among the big names making news in the market today were UPS, Schwab, GE, Apache and Mariner, Lehman, and Wal-Mart. The Commentary: “As I mentioned yesterday, I didn't expect much change in open interest... and there wasn't. Gold open interest rose 356 contracts on volume of 140,269 contracts. Silver o.i. actually fell 619 contracts on very large volume of 57,820 contracts... of which almost 25% were roll-overs into July and later months. We're now half way through April... and May is a delivery month for silver. You can see that the activity level is picking up as we approach options expiry [April 28th] and first notice day... April 30th. The CME Delivery Report shows that 101 gold and 49 silver contracts are up for delivery on Friday. So far this month, 453 silver contracts have been delivered on the Comex. That's 2.3 million ounces... which ain't too shabby for a non-delivery month for silver... and the month is only half over. There were no changes reported in GLD yesterday... but the SLV had another whopping amount of silver taken out of it. This time it was an eye-watering 3,431,792 troy ounces. That's two full days of world silver production! Since February 26th... 14.4 million ounces of silver have been withdrawn from SLV by the 'authorized participants' because silver in quantity is not available anywhere else. The U.S. Mint had no report on Wednesday... but the Comex-approved depositories indicated that 367,866 ounces of silver were withdrawn on Tuesday. There was a lot of in-and-out activity... and if you want to see it for yourself... here's the link.”– From Ed Steer’s Gold & Silver Daily, read the full report here.

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