What COMEX and Cushing Say While Everyone Watches LME Zinc

The premise behind an on-warrant search is simple: strip out the cancelled warrants and the eligible-but-unregistered metal, and see what is actually free to hand to a buyer. That distinction between total stock and deliverable stock is the only number that matters when paper prices and physical supply diverge. We do not have LME zinc on-warrant figures in front of us this week, so the Desk points the same lens at the metals and barrels where the deliverable-versus-total gap is documented.

The deliverable gap, not the headline stock

The lesson from any warehouse feed is that a big total is not the same as available metal. In COMEX gold, the vault total barely moved, down 1.6% to 27.12M oz, while the amount actually free to deliver was little changed, up 5,016 oz to 14.82M oz (0.0%). Only 55% of that vault is registered and deliverable. The rest is eligible metal sitting behind an owner who has not offered it up. Apply the same filter to LME zinc and the question is identical: how much of the reported tonnage carries a live warrant versus a cancelled one.

Silver shows the gap wider still. Total COMEX silver rose 1.1% to 326.02M oz, and the deliverable slice ticked up 0.4% to 93.01M oz. That leaves only 29% of the vault free to deliver. A reader watching the top-line silver number would see a comfortable pile; the on-warrant equivalent shows less than a third of it is actually available. This is the exact structural point an LME on-warrant search is built to surface.

Where physical tightness is measurable right now

For a cleaner read on physical availability, the Desk tracks Cushing, Oklahoma, the delivery point behind the WTI contract. Cushing sits at 19.6 M bbl as of Jul 3, 2026, toward the low end of the last 22 years. That is the oil equivalent of a thin on-warrant column: the benchmark's physical backing is running near multi-decade lows even while the broader system looks adequate.

The broader system does look adequate, which is the point. US commercial crude inventory stands at 411.4 M bbl as of Jul 3, 2026, around the middle of its 44-year range. And the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve sits at 319.5 M bbl as of Jul 3, 2026, near its lowest level in 44 years. Three different oil gauges, three different readings. The headline commercial number is unremarkable; the delivery point and the emergency stash are not. Same principle as filtering LME zinc: aggregate stock hides the stress that shows up when you isolate the metal, or barrels, that actually clear.

What we would watch on the zinc feed

When LME zinc on-warrant data is in hand, the checklist mirrors what the COMEX and Cushing readings above already illustrate. Watch the ratio of on-warrant to total stock, the way COMEX gold shows 55% deliverable and silver 29% as of this week. Watch the direction of cancelled warrants, since metal marked for withdrawal leaves the deliverable column before it physically leaves the shed. And watch whether a falling on-warrant figure coincides with a flat or rising total, the tell that available metal is tightening while the headline looks calm.

The Desk will report the LME zinc on-warrant series when the feed is populated. Until then, the deliverable-gap behavior is visible in the COMEX metals and the Cushing crude figures dated Jul 3, 2026 and this week's warehouse update. The method transfers cleanly; only the metal changes.