Silver rose to its highest price in years on Monday when it became the latest target for a brigade of day traders on Reddit.
The precious metal recently traded up about 9 percent at around $ 29.40 an ounce, after climbing above $ 30 for the first time since 2013. GameStop and AMC Entertainment.
The bulletin board has waged war on hedge funds betting against those downtrodden companies – and now some budding traders want to do a similar “short squeeze” in silver to pressure banks that have gambled on the price drop.
“Silver Bullion Market is one of the most manipulated on the planet,” Reddit user RocketBoomGo wrote in a popular post outlining the thesis. “Any short press in silver paper bottoms would be EPIC.”
“If you don’t care about the profit, think about the banks like JP MORGAN that you would destroy along the way,” the poster added.
The “#SilverSqueeze” movement was backed by the Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the twin brother of venture capitalists who sued famed Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and currently run a cryptocurrency exchange.
“The #silversqueeze is a rage against the machine,” Tyler Winklevoss said on Twitter Sunday.
But the squeeze game was not universally accepted on the board of 7.8 million WallStreetBets members. Several reports on Monday urged members to avoid gambling on silver, with some claiming hedge funds and the media were pushing the price hike.
“Stop trying to make silver happen, it won’t happen,” wrote a user named snacksandmetal.
However, the skeptics did not stop the interest in silver exploding. Precious metals broker APMEX said demand over the weekend was 12 times higher than normal and it added as many new customers on Saturday as normal in a week.
“We have made strategic decisions to purchase additional metal, locking up any metal we can find in the market,” CEO Ken Lewis said in a statement posted on the APMEX website. “We suspect that premiums will rise and fall rapidly as we see significant increases in our costs while we can even locate the metal.”
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