COMEX, ICE Gold Vault Reports Both Overstate Eligible Gold Inventory
by Ronan Manly via BullionStar.com,
ZeroHedge.com
Dec 26, 2016
Introduction
In the world of gold market reportage, much is written about gold futures prices, with the vast majority of reporting concentrating on the CME’s COMEX contracts. Indeed, when it comes to COMEX gold, a veritable cottage industry of websites and commentators makes its bread and butter commentating on COMEX gold price gyrations and the scraps of news connected to the COMEX. The reason for the commentators’ COMEX fixation is admittedly because that’s where the trading volume is. But such fixation tends to obscure the fact that there is another set of gold futures contracts on ‘The Street’, namely the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) gold futures contracts that trade on the ICE Futures US platform.
These ICE gold futures see little trading volume. Nonetheless, they have a setup and infrastructure rivaling that of COMEX gold futures, for example, in the reporting of the gold inventories from the vault providers that have been approved and licensed by ICE for delivery of gold against its gold futures contracts.
At the end of each trading day, both CME and ICE publish reports showing warehouse inventories of gold in Exchange licensed facilities/depositories which meet the requirements for delivery against the Exchanges’ gold futures contracts. These inventories are reported in two categories, Eligible gold and Registered gold. Many people will be familiar with the COMEX version of the report. A lot less people appear to know about the ICE version of the report. For all intents and purposes they are similar reports with identical formats.
Most importantly, however, both reports are technically incorrect for the approved vaults that they have in common because neither Exchange report takes into account the Registered gold reported by the other Exchange. Therefore, the non-registered gold in each of the vaults in common is being overstated, in a small way for COMEX, and in a big way for ICE. And since COMEX and ICE have many approved vaults in common, technically this is a problem.
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