Jeff Christian: It’s Not Just Gold—Computerized Trading Used to Manipulate All Markets

Tuesday, March 18, 2014
By Paul Martin

FinancialSense.com
03/17/2014

Last week, towards the end of a very lively and comprehensive roundtable discussion on gold, Financial Sense Newshour host Jim Puplava asked his guests whether they thought the gold market was being manipulated. Of the three responses, CPM Group’s Jeff Christian was the most interesting. Here’s what he had to say:

“[S]hort-term manipulations happen. And it’s unfortunate for a couple reasons…it gives fodder to those people who prey on the fear of conspiracy theorists. It’s not a conspiracy theory: it’s people coming in and hitting the market. We looked at October of last year and, just as an example, on October 1st the price of gold fell sharply in a five-minute period because of heavy trading on the COMEX. And the conspiracy theorists say, “Somebody came in and whacked the gold market. It was the government trying to suppress the price.” And if you looked at the data you found that it was more than a hundred different people trading gold in that five minute period—selling gold. And they were doing it because they were using the same computers using the same price chart. And those computers said if gold drops below this level, sell. And we looked at October as a whole and we found seven five-minute periods with abnormally high volumes: more than a million ounces of gold changing hands in a five minute period seven times over the course of October on the COMEX. Four of them were buying events—people gunning stops and driving the price higher. Three of them were selling events driving the price lower. So, you look at that and then you look at the data, you realize in each case, it wasn’t a single entity doing the heavy buying: it was hundreds of people doing programmed computerized trading. And then you step back from gold and you realize that’s true across commodities. And, in fact, it’s much more severe in some of the less liquid grain markets than it is in gold and silver. Then you take another step back and you realize it’s true across financial markets; it’s true in stocks, in bonds, in fixed income securities, and stock futures. And so if you take off your gold-tinted glasses…you realize that financial markets across assets have a problem with this computerized trading and it’s not Big Brother trying to suppress the price of gold.”

The Rest…HERE

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