The world's largest silver exchange, Comex, has 103 million ounces of silver available for delivery right now. And just in a month's time, they're facing over 400 million ounces of open contracts. It's like having 100 pizzas and 400 very hungry people showing up for dinner. The first notice day for March delivery is February 27th, a day you might want to write down. That's less than a couple of weeks away as I'm recording this. And the vaults of Comex are draining at 785 ounces. Sorry, 785,000 ounces, they'd like it to be just that, every single day. So the math doesn't work. Something has to break. So whether you own silver or thinking about it, you just want to understand what's happening in the financial system, what happens in the next 30 days could reshape metals pricing for years and also the economy. Because you can't spell AI without metals. So maybe you're a tech investor. Doesn't matter, this affects you. So today, Winston and I are going to show you exactly what's happening inside those vaults, why March is the date everyone's watching, and how you can position yourself so that this thing blows up or it gets, you know, it fizzles out. My name is Felix Prin, I'm an ex-investment banker. I've seen how the industry actually works on the inside. One of my mentors is a former London metal exchange market maker. So we've got quite a lot of insight over here, especially Winston. He's friends with all the traders. So I'm not going to give you the sanitized version they show on CNBC. I'm going to show you the real mechanics of how these markets move and why. I'm also the founder of the GOAT Academy, where my retired Wall Street mentors teach regular people like you institutional strategies. I'm also the co-founder of TradeMission, where we keep track of the data and the news. Our mission here is very simple. Take the playbook Wall Street users to profit, often at, well, your expense if we're honest about it, and put that into your hands. And right now, there is something happening in the silver market that the mainstream media is barely covering. They're too busy telling you about the next, I don't know, meme stock or the latest Epstein email. You always have to ask yourself when there's a circus, what are they distracting from and why? So what I'm about to show you is not conspiracy, it's math. It's public data from the Comex itself. And if you want to understand it, well, you'll be ahead of 99% of investors. You're going to go and wake up in April wondering what the heck just happened. So before we dive in, let me explain what COMEX actually is, because people have no idea. Well, most persane people with real friends, you know. I just talk to him, he'll put up with that. Um but Comex is the commodity exchange. It's where silver and gold futures are traded. It's technically part of the CME group, which is the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where they uh work very, very hard for the benefit of mankind and puppies. Um, and it's the official price-setting mechanism for all precious metals in America. Sort of the world, but mostly America. Now, where it gets a little more exciting is that Comex is what we call a paper market. Most people trading there never touch physical silver. They're allergic to the stuff. Actually, true story, I went to school with a friend, and his dad was in the gold business, and uh he was meant to take it over, and he was allergic to gold, which is kind of an interesting random side story. You can apparently be allergic to gold. Um, Comex allows you to trade contracts, promises, and those promises are not settled for the physical metal, but for profit, for cash. So it's sort of like going into a restaurant. Um I'm a vegetarian, so the stakehouse analogy is not the greatest here. Um thank you, whoever made my slides. Um, but yeah, imagine you go to a restaurant, 95% of people are in there and they're just exchanging pictures of food and then they go home. They don't consume the actual food, right? So that's kind of how you picture that. And then Comex has two categories, and this is really important to understand. They have silver in their vaults, which is registered, which means it's available for delivery. It can leave the vault. This is the stuff that when somebody says, Give me my metal, Kermex will hand it over. And then there is the eligible silver, and that's silver that's sitting in Comex's vaults, but it belongs to somebody else. It is not available for delivery unless the owner wants to move it, sell it. In other words, eligible silver is like if your neighbor parks his car in your garage, yes, there is a car there in your parking spot, but it is not your car. That's basically what eligible is. So when Comex tells you So when Comex tells you what they often do is they look at total inventory, they love to include both numbers. It makes the vault look fuller than it actually is. So it'd be like you saying, look, those are my 12 car parking spaces. I have 12, well, 11 Ferraris and one, you know, Honda Civic. And only the Honda Civic is yours and the other 11 are other people's Ferraris. That's kind of what Comex does. And as of February 2026, Comex has about 103 million ounces of registered silver. Total inventory, which is the number they always give you, is over 400 million. But that's irrelevant because that isn't their silver, right? So 103 million is the number that matters. The rest is just noise, you know, fauzy. So here is where it gets just a little bit alarmist. This is not a doom and gloom video, but it's a little bit urgent, right? Registered silver is down 70% since 2020. Registered means the stuff they actually own, right? So you could just say silver, Comek silver inventory is down 70%, the real inventory. We have almost, well, 785 ounces of silver walking out of the door every single day, you know, marching out, going, we're free. Um, and the drain is accelerating. It isn't slowing down. So if you think about this, we had 300 something million in 2020. Now we only have 103. Almost a million walking out every single day. How long do you think this Ponzi scheme is going to last? And I say Ponzi scheme, I mean uh this well-oiled machine of uh market efficiency. How is it going to you you get the drift, right? So I want to give you a simple framework to understand what's happening and what's about to happen. I call it the silver vault framework. I know it's very imaginative. Uh, Winston came up with it. Um, and we we you know we call it the VPP framework. Uh it is vault pressure position. So, first we verify what's actually in the vault, and then we understand the pressure that's building, and then we position ourselves accordingly. So let's start with the vault part. We've already established that the amount of silver in the vaults is 103.5 million, if you want to be precise as I'm recording this. That's what's in the vault. But that isn't actually all sitting in one place. Comex vaul are spread across multiple facilities managed by different banks and different depositories. And the number changes every single day. Now, in January of 2026, Jan, almost 50 million ounces left those vaults. Now, why is that bonkers? Because if you go back two years, so this year is 2026, but if you look at just 2024, when the world was still, you know, uh blissfully unaware about silver, only 6.8 million ounces walked out of that door. So this is a massive increase. It's a 7x increase in gold. Sorry, silver leaving the vaults. Now, the official explanation from the exchanges is this is normal market activity. Yeah, right. Seven times more deliveries is normal, right? It's just like how your credit card bill being seven times higher than usual, is normal spending. Maybe that's what your wife's trying to tell you, but yeah, dig a little deeper. And it isn't just Comex. It isn't just an American New York slash Chicago problem. Shanghai silver inventories are at the lowest since 2016. The London Metal Exchange, where one of my mentors used to be a market maker, is at historic lows. So it's like musical chairs, and the music is getting very, very quiet. Now, China's classified silver a strategic material, and they put export controls on it, so you can't just export the stuff anymore. China is one of the biggest silver processes, by the way. And the US has also classified it as a strategic material. So we're not talking conspiracy theories here, right? We're talking government public policy. And then there is a number that you watch if you understand this market a little bit more, which is actually the one thing that tells you whether there is lots of silver or whether we are kind of short of the stuff. And most people never get to hear about this. This is called the silver lease rate. You might want to write this down. A lease rate is what it costs to borrow silver, physical silver. Now, why would you want to do that? Well, say you want to short silver because you're a Wall Street lunatic and you think, well, I've done this for the last 30 years, it's made me very wealthy, I'm going to keep doing it. Um let's see how well that pans out. So, what do you do? Well, you need to borrow physical silver. To borrow physical silver, you need to pay an interest rate to whoever owns that silver. So when you see all these people out there who are saying uh we pay you a dividend on your gold and silver. No, no, no. You are lending your gold and silver out to some lunatic trader on Wall Street or in Chicago, and then you're getting a fraction of what they're currently paying to borrow it, right? It's the same, I was gonna say, uh, Ponzi scheme, but just the same high-risk automated setting that most brokerages have. If you open a new brokerage account, I opened uh, what did I open the other day? I opened um, I need to active broker's account because I started running a trading experiment and I wanted to have a fresh account, put a million bucks into it, and so on, different story. But there is an automated setting at the beginning that says um share lending is switched on. Earn money with share lending is automatically on. And that's the same thing. You're lending it out to somebody else. If that somebody else goes out of business, what happens? Well, what you've lent them is gone, right? If you lend your um car to your lunatic neighbor and he drives it down a cliff and it explodes, well, it's gone, isn't it? What are you gonna do about it, right? But to go back to the lease rate signal here, normally it costs less than half a percent at point to borrow silver because it's plentyful. Uh they're probably leasing out five times over, but that's a whole different story. So right now it's 8%. 8%. So when these lease rates spike, the interest rate spikes, it means it's hard to find physical silver. People are willing to pay, like, what is that? 25 times higher interest to borrow silver. Now that doesn't happen when the vaults are full, because it's demand and supply, right? It happens when the vaults are empty and people are scrambling. But hey, Comek says everything is just fine. So I'm sure they have a great official explanation where it's just business as normal. But something about those normal market dynamics, and you know, maybe they borrow the phrase seasonal adjustments, which is what the government does when they make up their data, flags a warning bell with meat. So now we move to the second part of our framework, right? The Winston framework, we should have called it that. Pressure. March is a main delivery month for silver on Comex. What does that mean? It means contract holders, who have that, you know, paper silver, they can demand physical silver for their contracts. And the numbers are pretty staggering. There are about 500 million contracts for about 100 million in silver available. How does that even happen? How is that even legal? Anyway, that's what's going on there. So think about this. If just 10% of these guys, 10%, want at the end of the contract, they say, I want silver. I don't want money, I want silver, I think it's worth more than the paper stuff the government keeps printing. Well, then you're looking at basically 53 million ounces leaving the vaults. There's only 100 million in there. Now, what if 20% of those contract holders would say, well, look, I want physical silver. Well, then you're looking at about 100 million ounces leaving the vaults. And your vaults are now very empty. You could throw great, beautiful dinner parties in there, but if other than that, they'd be fairly useless. People would walk in and say, this is the place where once the most silver in the world was stored. Now it is empty. Now, the first day that we're going to find out what's actually happening is February. Write this down. What happened to my pen? February 27th. My pen's having a spaz out. You see, this information is not meant for public consumption, apparently. It's a bit of a laggy pen there. Okay, we'll we'll try and figure that out. February 27th, if you could read that. Uh it's when the traders must declare if they want physical silver. So, a couple of weeks from now. And in the meantime, 785,000 ounces are leaving per day. So I remember mumbling my words because it's staggering, right? So you do the maths. Between now and 27th, you're likely to see another 16 million ounces leave Kermex. I'm literally not permitted to draw these numbers. Conspiracy theorists are uh, yeah, you get the idea, huh? Are uh everywhere. Now, now there's another piece of data I want to give you. And I'm appreciated this is a fairly information dense, so I'm sorry about that, but this is just where we are. In February 2026, and we're only partially through that month, the delivery rate right now is 98%. What does that mean? It means 90% of people who can get their silver are getting it delivered, which is staggering. Over 18 million ounces so far delivered this month. So you kind of get the idea of what's happening here. This is not a bunch of silver believers. No. These are at traders, hedge funds. And what they're seeing is that they can get, what they're seeing is that they can buy paper silver at paper silver prices and then get physical silver for it. And maybe you have a better connection, but the silver dealers that I talk to, they say to me, yeah, you can have some off silver, Felix, we'll deliver it into your vault in about June, July. And I'm like, June, July? Are you guys mad? Yeah, they said that there just isn't any. So if you want to get silver now, and you have enough money in your other Comex account, you just buy the paper stuff, you then convert it into the physical stuff, and now you get the physical silver. Why would people do that? Profit, greed, right? And that's what I'm thinking about is happening, and this is speculation, obviously, on my part, that the industrial users might be doing this. Say you're Elon Musk, right? You want to be build the biggest chip manufacturing facility in the world. You're gonna need a lot of silver to build all your robots and all your chips and everything else. So, what do you do? Well, you can go to the miners and they say, yeah, you can have it in in a year's time. You can go to the traders and they say you can have it in six months at this premium, or you can go to Comex and you can buy it at today's artificially suppressed price. Okay, just my humble opinion. Why wouldn't you just do that? And then you just store it. So, what happens here if Comex runs out of silver? And what is then the opportunity for you and I and my silver hound? Well, Comex can do several things. Comex could say, we're gonna give you cash instead of metal. They actually have that power within their rules to completely control everything. So they say, yeah, you wanted silver, yeah, that's very nice, but we're gonna give you dollars instead. You know, the stuff we can print. It's legal under exchange rules. But it destroys their credibility as a price setting mechanism because they're basically saying, we haven't any silver. We're not really a silver exchange anymore. That's i that's that's one way of dealing with it. The second scenario that they could do would be they change the rules. Right? They could raise margin requirements to force people to sell their their silver contracts. And uh they've done that just again, right? Three or four times so far this year, bonkers. They could impose position limits, they could make it harder for you to get delivery, which is exactly what they did in 1980, in 2011. And they could also simply fade out, phase out even, um, the present contracts. And they've introduced just a futures contract that has no right to underlying silver. It's just a piece of paper. And it's just denominated in dollars. You get dollars if you make money, if you don't make money, you get less dollars. No silver in it, right? So that Comex could just become a silver-free silver marketplace, which would be a little odd. And then the third scenario is where paper silver and physical silver prices could diverge dramatically. And we're already seeing this, right? So Shanghai physical silver premium is about$40 above Comex paper price, which is normal. And in a free market, what you would then do is, well, you get the physical silver at Comex and you'd chip it to China and you'd make the money, right? Which is exactly what happened to gold at the beginning of 2025. It was it was cheaper to buy gold futures in London and then convert them into physical gold, which they had, and then ship the physical gold to the US where you could sell a lot of profit. So, of course, there'll be a trader, there'd be a hedge fund guy who figures that out and he makes a margin. It's called an arbitrage trade. It's a sort of thing, but I was looking at Bobinosa banker for a little while. Art trades. Now, what does Comek say about it? Well, they say delivery issues are theoretical, as in we haven't run out yet, so stop asking me uncomfortable questions. You're likely to make this happen. Now, can you see? Can you see the tail going back there? Um, he's dreaming about silver. Now, what I learned from my mentors, guys who worked in these metal exchanges and worked in Wall Street, worked for big hedge funds and investing banks, is that markets repeat. Not exactly, but the patterns really rhyme. And they've shown me this playbook before. I've got people who are old enough to remember the 1980s Silver Thursday, right? What happened back then? Well, the Hunt brothers had accumulated a massive position in silver. Silver was heading towards$50. And what did the exchange do? Well, they just changed the rule. They implemented something called the Silver Rule 7. It limited trading to selling only. You could only sell, you could not buy. Imagine that. Imagine your brokerage says to you, you can sell your stocks, but you can't buy any. Sounds a mad, right? It's exactly what Robinhood did with GameStop, by the way. What's the result? Well, silver crashed from$50 to$10. 80% decline. So these guys might get desperate, and that is the risk that we need to be aware of. The Hunt brothers got wiped out. The exchanges, they said uh we're maintaining an orderly market. Uh so you know, markets uh order to go in one direction because the house will always win. Remember that. Then we had the um 2011 margin massacre. Again, silver was ripping higher after the financial crisis. People somehow lost faith in banks. I have no idea why. Of course, you want to give your money to bankers. Surely they've got your best interests at heart. They're not thinking about their own bonuses, no, never. And silver again hits$49, almost a hunt brother high. So what happens? CME raised their margin requirements five times in two weeks. Each time they raised their margins, leverage traders had a sell. It created this massive cascade of selling. And they crashed silver by almost 50%. So what's the pattern? Silver threatens to break out, the exchange changes rules, prices crashes. We saw this in December. We've just seen this again. So be aware of this, right? It's the same playbook, the same players, the same outcome. And if you look at the guys behind Robin Hood, by the way, you'll find that they will also lead back to Chicago. But I leave that digging up to you. But yeah, take a screenshot of this. This is the pattern. Happens again and again and again. Same players, same outcomes. Now, if I were a cynic, I would say, isn't it interesting that the exchanges only manage risk when prices go up? You never see them raising margins when silver is crashing, right? Which is obviously clearly a funny coincidence. Nothing to do with anybody, you know, manipulating markets. But it was different in 1980 and 2011. That's also important to understand. In 1980, COMEX had plenty of silver. In 2011, the volts were full. In 2026, the vaults are nearly empty. They can change the rules, yes. They can raise margins, yes. But they can't create silver that doesn't exist. Now, before we get into how we position ourselves on this, which is of course the most important part of this video, I want to share something with you. If you're watching this and thinking, I need to understand these patterns better. Well, I put together a free mini masterclass. It was two hours, and then I've got it down to 45, and then I got it down to 17 minutes because I appreciate many people have TikTok damaged brains. And it'll teach you essentially how we learn the Wall Street rules of buying and selling. So it teaches you the exact methods institutional investors use, which is what I've learned during my time as a banker, and then since then from my Wall Street mentors. And it's simply a free video. You can watch it at FelixFriendson.org slash get free, check it out, and just watch that. Write down the link or click on it down below in the description. And I'll do one better for you as well. I also have a daily free metals newsletter where we give you in an opinionated version of what actually happened in the day. We give you all the data, what's important. There's a daily version, there's a weekly version, it's completely free of charge. Tens of thousands of people are on this. You can just select daily, weekly or both, pop in your email, you're done, it'll add in your inbox. You don't like it, you unsubscribe from it. And I think that'll help you understand better what's happening over the coming days and weeks, because we're obviously in uh, well, some would say uncharted territory. I would say we're we're simply in the uh end phase of a pattern that we've seen many, many times. But we now need to understand the third and final step of the silver vault framework, the Winston framework. How do we actually position ourselves? And this isn't financial advice. I'm not registered as there's anything other than as a you know, Winston's keeper. You do actually have the registered dogs here, which I think is a bit bit bit racist, quite frankly. Um, not financial advice, right? Do your own conclusions. But I can tell you how I think about this and how the institutional guys approach this from in my humble opinion. First, we need to understand the fundamental backdrop. Silver has been in a supply deficit for five years. Well, the pen is still not working. We're talking about 200 million ounces per year as a deficit. So since 2021, we got about a billion ounces of silver that we are short of. Why? Well, first of all, we have demand, right? Are we allowed to write yet? Let me see. Maybe the maybe the typing helps. Maybe I'm not allowed to write because my handwriting is so terrible. People keep telling me that. So we have we have insane, we have things like uh a solar panel. The solar panel needs about 20 grams, 30, that's a little much, about 20 grams per panel, right? Solar installation is growing exponentially because you all want to protect the whales or the dolphins or something, which I you know come commend you for. I can't spell demand, obviously that too. EVs, they need five to ten times more silver than a gas car. You have AI. You can literally can't spell it without silver. There is silver in electronics and semiconductors, and the total industrial demand, AID even. So total industrial demand is about 700 million ounces per year and growing rapid. So why don't people just mine more silver? We we invest in in silver miners because uh a lot of the time they make us a lot of money. And I showed you guys before. If you want a little bit of a watch list there, again, I'm not telling you to buy these, but if you just want to get a bit of a starting place in Trade Vision here, I have a watch list of silver miners, take a screenshot of that in some of the bigger ETFs and so on, and we, you know, you can see what happened yesterday, but it might well be red by the time you're watching this. This is a fairly volatile market. But if you look at why they're not mining more, more quickly. This here is the answer to that. But 80% of silver is a byproduct of mining, copper, lead, zinc. Silver mines themselves are about a quarter of the market. So you can't just say let's dig more silver up. Even if prices doubled, it takes years to bring new mines online. And the lead in the zinc mines, where all the silver comes from, are not going to dig up more unless there is significantly more lead in zinc supply demand. Now, we've discussed a lot, we've covered a lot. Uh proud of you for still bearing with me to really understand what's going on here. But we need to really understand the silver versus the paper stuff, the physical versus the silver. ETFs like SLV, futures contracts, mining stocks, that's paper silver. Advantages are what? Well, they're very liquid, they're easy to trade, there's no storage cost, no insurance cost, no one's going to break into your home and steal it, which is why I always advocate private storage units. What are the disadvantages? Well, there's a counterparty risk. You might not get silver, you might get cash, and they may not track physical prices if this mad world where paper and physical is priced differently, which is where we are right now. Now, physical are, you know, coins, bars, and if you own those, there's no counterparty risk. It's yours. You own it. It's just it. But you gotta store it. There's security issues, you will pay a premium and you buy it, and they're a lot less liquid, right? It's harder to sell than an ETF where you press a button. Now, the official position of the financial industry is that paper silver and physical silver are equivalent. Which is true until it isn't. When Shanghai pays a$40 premium for physical silver over paper, well, it's not really equivalent anymore, is it? And I can't get my hand on any for like six months, then there is an issue there. Now I'm not saying, let me be very clear on this, that silver's gonna go up tomorrow. They could change the rules, they've done it before. There could be short-term crashes, we've seen it just, right? Raise margins again, they could make buying impossible, all that stuff. So the risk is, so the risk is that the short-term guys are gonna get burnt again. We've seen this many, many, many times. The opportunity, which in my mind is based on the fact that the vaults are empty, nearly empty, the supply deficit isn't gonna go away, and industrial demand is growing, it isn't shrinking. So even if they paper over this next month or two, the fundamental problem remains. So there are analysts out there who have$300 price targets on silver, and others say it's$50 as a new floor and so on. And I'm not gonna give you a specific number, I think that's just silly because nobody knows. It's just a number that you put out there because you want to get some clicks. But the supply and demand fundamentals are the tightest they've been in many, many decades, if not ever. So, what do you actually do with this information? Well, here's my thinking. Step one is you watch for February 27th. If I'm allowed a pen, I'm not allowed a pen. They say, nope, you've spilled too much already. Zip it. Actually, I have a backup pen. Let's try this one. Notice day, yay, we're back in handwriting business. Everyone's going, no, stop handwriting. Type, Felix, we can't read your scribbles. That's the 27th of Feb is the first notice day for the March contracts. Watch how many contracts stand for delivery. I'll keep you up and up to date on that. Subscribe to the newsletter, we'll definitely keep you up to date on that. If this is, give you some numbers, if this is above, so greater than say 75 million ounces, things could get very interesting, very dicey. It'd be very interesting to see how Comex reacts because they're going to be out of silver in a heartbeat. And then we can track the registered inventory at the COMEX, daily, weekly, whatever. And again, if that drops below, you know, if it's less than say 80 million, 80 million ounces, well, you get to first notice day and you see your maths becomes one without a problem. And the third thing is, and this is what nobody really seems to understand yet, is watch the lease rate. We're at 8%. If that goes up more, it's like maybe you've seen this on stocks that get shorter. There's the same thing. There is a borrow fee you gotta pay. When that goes to the roof, you know you're at a point of no return. It's the market telling you physical silver is scarce. So our framework, verify what's actually available, right? Not the headline numbers, the real stuff that's available. You understand that now. Understand the pressure building, as in how many of those contracts are being converted into physical silver. And then you've got to position yourself according to your timeline and your risk tolerance. Maybe just a few words on that. Silver is a highly speculative thing, right? It shouldn't be, but it is, because the powers that be have been speculating with us very profitably for many, many decades. I would argue that gold is the less speculative long-term hold. Gold will probably do that. That's just my view of it, right? That's gold. Now, can I get a silver colour? Just assume blue is silver. Silver is gonna do that, right? It wasn't blue, was it? No, but you get the idea. So you've got to ask yourself, can you live with that? Because your stomach lining made for it, right? If the last crash made you feel really uncomfortable and you didn't sleep well and you went home and you drank a bottle of vodka, you have too much silver. Very simple. And that's what I talk about risk tolerance. The biggest thing with risk tolerance is how much of a percentage of your portfolio is it? Say you have 10% of your money in silver, right? 10% in silver. What if the market crashes, say, minus 30%? How much of your money have you lost? Tell you, 3%. Which might be manageable. It might be okay for you, right? You can obviously then make that calculation and say, well, what if I had 20% of my money in silver? If it's 20%, market goes down 30%, you just got to multiply the two figures. Well, now you've lost 6% of your money. And that's starting to feel pretty freaking uncomfortable. So you've got to understand where you are at in terms of position sizing. Can you handle the downside? And all the smartest traders in the world I know, they only are concerned about this number. How much of my money is at risk? And that's really the important part here. So, in short, the exchanges will tell you this is a normal market, all normal market activity. And then yes, they're technically right, because when the house always wins, um, rigging the game is is possibly normal. Of course, I would not accuse Koenigs of rigging the market. They are uh upstanding members of the financial uh industry, which isn't that higher standard, really, is it? Uh, and I would know that as nice to be one of them. So if you want to learn how to read these markets, like the institutional buggers, if you want to understand the same tactics that Wolf reduces, the patterns that they use, watch the free masterclass that is down below at freelixfriends.org slash get free. And stay up to date with the story. Join the free newsletter, it's also down below there just to say thank you to you guys and give you guys some information that most people then have access to. And I'll be here. And Winston and I will break down the next bit of madness that's gonna occur in the civil market, and I can assure you it's going to stay entertaining. All the best.