We say goodbye to August, and the active month for gold at The Bucket Shop, and welcome the first stirrings of September, which promises to be much more interesting for silver.

Prices were heavy for the metals most of the day, with silver showing a little more perkiness, but gold doggedly hanging on to close for a slight gain.

We have an interesting, if yet undecided, chart formation on the daily gold chart in a potential cup and handle formation that, if activated and confirmed, will target a minimum objective of around $1,255 and even a likely test of the big prior support from the trading range at $1,270.

To put this potential formation to ‘work’ gold must continue to hold its successful retest of 1120 on the ‘handle,’ and move to take and break the top of the cup at 1170. This is no mean feat, since gold is being pressed upon so heavily by the meddlers in the forex crosses. Despite the propaganda, it most certainly is a currency of the world.

Silver is just coming into its own and September will most likely to provide some fireworks for the beta rocket, depending on which way the black swans start coming home to roost. We have already seen the first deliveries taken for September, as noted on the clearing report below, of about 835,000 ounces. 

I keep hearing stories of retail shortages and premiums that are certainly interesting.  I will be more interested if we start seeing some pressures at the wholesale level.

Gold went out quietly, with Goldman stopping another 49 August contracts for their ‘house account.’

I am hearing some talk about leaner times for gold bullion supplies at the LBMA for this booming physical gold market in Asia and India. There is certainly not much bullion up for sale at these prices in NY. Perhaps the bullion banks will use a quiet September to regroup and reform, if they get a quiet month that is.

Better not to try and guess, and look ahead too much however. These pool operations, which we are almost certainly seeing now in my judgement, take a long time to reach their natural conclusion. But they always seem to get there one way or the other.

So perhaps we can use this time to get our own houses in order, to put our pieces on the board where we are sure that we will have them if things get more interesting.  I certainly would not wish to put them in an unallocated pile in some vault managed by the status quo, since possession is nine-tenths of the law to these jokers, as we saw with MFGlobal’s default.

I am ambivalent about the miners here, mostly because I am in the position of owning some, which I have not done for quite some time.  But silver is too temping with its 77:1 ratio to gold, and the absolutely beaten down into the ground place of some fairly tempting mining stocks.

Oh well, let’s see if we can get something more substantial to hang our hats on, like the activation of a chart formation or some especially bullion friendly news for a change. The gold trolls were out in force today on the financial networks, so we will have to see what this means if anything.

There was a greater than usual amount of information about the metals posted over the weekend, so you may wish to scroll down and have a look if you have not done so already. There are quite a few odd little things happening that seem to be missed by most.

Have a pleasant evening.