September Silver Is Three-Quarters Delivered Five Sessions In, and the Biggest Taker Is a Client Account

Of the 6,757 September silver contracts still open at the close of August 27, the last session before the first delivery notices were filed, 5,032 have been delivered in the five sessions since: 74.5 percent, 25.2 million ounces, a quarter of the 99.6 million ounces registered in COMEX vaults on September 2. The largest taker is not a bank trading its own book. It is JP Morgan's customer omnibus account, which stopped 2,093 of those contracts, 41.6 percent, for clients the report does not name.

Standing before first notice, and why this is the first month we can show it

A long who still holds a September contract at the last close before first notice is standing for delivery, or is about to decide not to. A short who wants to deliver files a notice; the clearing house assigns it to the longs, oldest positions first, and each clearing firm allocates within its own accounts. The notice is dated by the day it is filed and settles two sessions later, so the August 28 filings delivered on September 1. The long who is assigned has bought 5,000 ounces of silver sitting in a COMEX-registered vault, delivered as a warrant, and that evening's report lists which clearing firm stopped the contract and which issued it, house account or customer account. What the report never shows is how many of the longs open the night before were going to stand, and the exchange publishes open interest by contract month only for the current day and sells the dated archive.

We have captured the free page every session from July 31 through September 2, 24 of 24. August's last pre-notice close was July 30, one day before the capture began. September is therefore the first delivery month where both ends of the comparison are ours: the contracts open at the last close before notices, and the contracts delivered after it, day by day, with names on both sides. That is the whole window. Nine months of firm-level notices, five weeks of open interest. Nothing here is a record and nothing here is a trend; it is one month measured properly, with the next one to follow.

The ladder, session by session

• August 27, close: 6,757 open. The standing, in the sense that matters: everyone still long at the last close before the first notices were filed.
• August 28, first filing day: 3,830 notices. House accounts stopped 1,779, customer accounts 2,051. Open interest closed at 4,933, a net 1,824 fewer: contracts closed or rolled rather than standing.
• August 31: 408 notices. Open interest 1,077.
• September 1: 666 notices, and open interest rose by 129 to 1,206. With the prior session's 408 coming out, that arithmetic only works if 537 contracts of new open interest came into a contract already in delivery. Someone added September silver after first notice. We cannot see who.
• September 2: 79 notices. Open interest 558, the last reading we hold; the September 3 line lands with tonight's bulletin.
• September 3: 49 notices, for delivery on September 8, the first business day after Labor Day.

Cumulative: 5,032 contracts, 74.5 percent of the August 27 standing. The opening day's 3,830 is the fourth-largest first day of the nine silver delivery months in our archive this year, behind July (4,775), May (4,580) and March (4,540). The month-to-date total is already the fifth-largest of the nine, four contracts short of February's full month, with three weeks to run.

Who stopped it

JP Morgan's customer account stopped 2,093 contracts, 41.6 percent of the month so far: 1,600 on the first day, 260 on the 31st, 222 on September 1, 11 on the 2nd. That is the fourth-largest single-account share of the year's nine silver delivery months, behind Wells Fargo's house account at 52.9 percent of a 2,594-contract June and 48.4 percent of a 1,611-contract August, and Deutsche Bank's house account at 44.9 percent in April. May, July and August are missing sessions in our archive (five, two and one), so their figures here are of the sessions we hold; the rankings quoted survive the gaps.

A customer account is an omnibus. "JP Morgan customer" means positions that clear through JP Morgan for its clients, and the report carries neither their names nor their number. Two thousand contracts could be one fund or two hundred accounts. It is not the bank's own metal, and this page does not know whose it is.

The house side is thinner than usual. Banks' own accounts stopped 2,419 contracts, 48.1 percent, against 51.9 percent through customer accounts. That is the lowest house share of the year, tied with January's 48.1 percent, after 60.2 in February, 67.4 in March, 77.8 in April, 67.5 in May, 83.7 in June, 62.4 in July and 70.9 in August. Behind JP Morgan the takers are RBC's house account (821, 16.3 percent), StoneX's house account (697, 13.9 percent), Marex customers (409), Macquarie's house account (386) and Wells Fargo's house account (330). The clearing house's own account, firm 991, stopped 32 full-size contracts on September 2 and 3 and issued 160 micro contracts the same evenings, the 5-to-1 conversion we documented last week, still tying to the ounce.

The question every delivery month raises is whether JP Morgan stopped the most again. The archive says often, not always, and not most often. Across the 148 sessions since January 9 on which a silver delivery notice was filed, JP Morgan's customer account was the day's largest stopper, alone or tied, on 31; Wells Fargo's house account was on 36. By delivery month, JP Morgan's customer account led four of nine: January, February, July and now September. It is the biggest September taker. It is not the default one.

Who issued it, and the account on both sides

The other side of the same 5,032 contracts: JP Morgan's customer account issued 1,466 of them, 29.1 percent, more than anyone. Standard Chartered's house account issued 864, HSBC customers 568, BNP Paribas customers 389, Wells Fargo's house 356, Macquarie's customers 344 and its house 314, Marex customers 311, Deutsche Bank's house 296.

So the account that took the most also made the most. JP Morgan's customer omnibus stopped 2,093 and issued 1,466 in the same five sessions, a net of 627 contracts, 3.1 million ounces, into that pipe. One clearing firm carrying both the buyers and the sellers of a delivery month is what a large omnibus looks like from outside. It is not one client accumulating, and nobody outside the firm can tell how many clients it is.

The clean net takers are house accounts that issued nothing: RBC at 821 contracts and StoneX at 697, 7.6 million ounces between them onto their own books. The clean net providers, issuing without stopping, are Standard Chartered's house account (864), BNP Paribas's customers (389) and Macquarie's customers (344). HSBC's customers (568 issued, 34 stopped, net 534 out) and Deutsche Bank's house (296 issued, 78 stopped, net 218 out) ran both ways.

Gold, for the same five sessions

Gold ran the same five sessions with a different answer. The September gold contract had 2,811 contracts open at the August 27 close and 2,555 have been delivered through September 3, 90.9 percent against silver's 74.5. JP Morgan's customer account stopped 1,078 of them (42.2 percent), Wells Fargo's house 548, Macquarie customers 448, Deutsche Bank's house 287. BNP Paribas's customers issued 1,344, more than half the month, and JP Morgan's customers 712. The same omnibus tops the gold stops at almost the same share it tops the silver stops, which says more about how many clients clear there than about either metal.

Method and receipts

Every figure here comes from two tables we build ourselves and re-ran in one pass on September 4: the firm-level delivery notices, parsed each evening from CME's daily report (156 of the 164 sessions since January 9; the eight we never captured, May 5 to 8, May 27, June 30, July 29 and August 3, cannot be recovered, and none fall in this month), and the Section 62 open interest by contract month, captured from CME's daily bulletin every session from July 31 through September 2 (24 of 24). Each parsed row carries the SHA-256 of the PDF it came from. Each firm-level section is reconciled at parse time against the TOTAL line CME prints beneath it, and a section that does not reconcile is dropped rather than stored; the daily totals we publish are projected from the same reconciled rows, so the two tables cannot disagree by construction. The five sessions here reconcile at 3,830, 408, 666, 79 and 49.

Next reading: tonight's September 4 report, then September 8, the first session after Labor Day. The full-month grade lands October 1, on this page.