Normally the action in the gold and silver futures markets tends to be pretty similar, since the same general forces affect both precious metals. When inflation or some other source of anxiety is ascendant, both metals rise, and vice versa.
But lately – perhaps in a sign of how confused the world is becoming – gold and silver traders have diverged. Taking gold first, the speculators – who tend to be wrong at major inflection points – remain extremely bullish. Commercial traders, meanwhile – who tend to be right when speculators are wrong – are extremely bearish, with short positions more than double their longs. Historically that’s been a setup for a big drop in gold’s price.

Gold COT Report: Futures – Click to

Submitted by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,

At first, the idea of central banks intervening in the equity markets was probably seen even by its fans as a temporary measure. But that’s not how government power grabs work. Control once acquired is hard for politicians and their bureaucrats to give up. Which means recent events are completely predictable:

SNB’s U.S. Stock Holdings Hit $62.4 Billion
(Bloomberg) – The value of the Swiss National Bank’s portfolio of U.S. equities rose nearly 1 percent to a record in the three months through September on the back of rallying share prices.
The holdings increased to $62.4 billion from $61.8 billion at the end of June, according to calculations by Bloomberg based on the central bank’s regulatory filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and published on Monday.
The central bank had stakes in some 2,500 companies listed in the U.S., according to the SEC filing. Its biggest holdings were Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Exxon Mobil Corp., according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

SNB Stock Buying – Click to enlarge

The Bank of Japan’s Unstoppable Rise to Shareholder No. 1
(Bloomberg) – The Bank of Japan’s controversial march to the top of shareholder rankings in the world’s third-largest equity market is picking up pace.

Nice sentence:

Tears won’t be confined to Wall Street however: let’s not forget that none other than the Swiss National Bank is also long some 10.4 million shares of AAPL.

First it was the banks reporting horrendous numbers — largely, we were told, because of their exposure to recently-cratered energy companies. Now it’s Big Tech, which is a much harder thing to explain. The FAANGs (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google) own their niches and not so long ago were expected to generate strong growth pretty much forever. That’s why every large-cap mutual fund and most hedge funds (not to mention a few central banks) owned so much of them.
This year’s first quarter was emphatically not what their fans had in mind. Apple, for instance, reported not just a slowdown but a double-digit year-over-year sales decline:

Rotten Apple: Stock plunges 8% on earnings, revenue miss

(CNBC) – Apple reported quarterly earnings and revenue that missed analysts’ estimates on Tuesday, and its guidance for the current quarter also fell shy of expectations.

The tech giant said it saw fiscal second-quarter earnings of $1.90 per diluted share on $50.56 billion in revenue. Wall Street expected Apple to report earnings of about $2 a share on $51.97 billion in revenue, according to a consensus estimate from Thomson Reuters.