Comex and Shanghai - Gold and Silver Deliveries Compared Over the Last Five Years

I asked Nick of Sharelynx if he could wrangle up some comparison charts between the Comex and Shanghai for our inquiring minds.

Interestingly enough, Shanghai dominates in gold delivery, but Comex does reasonably well for silver over the last five years.    The new charts are shown below for both metals.

Comex delivered a total of 1,025 tonnes of gold, whereas Shanghai did 8,655.  And in the case of Comex much of their delivery had never left the warehouse complex until recently.  It went into customer storage and came back on a trade.  In Shanghai the gold must leave the warehouse.

In the case of silver, Comex has delivered 15,165 tonnes whereas Shanghai has done only 3,266.  But if you look at the Shanghai trend it is obviously growing at an accelerating rate in silver.

Interestingly enough, the delivery ratio of silver to gold at the Comex is about 15:1.  Again, we have to allow for the round trips that occur.

In the case of Shanghai the silver to gold ratio is skewed heavily to gold.  Gold seems to be the metal for China.   But that skew appears to be lessening in the past couple of years.

A comparison of the recent trends shows that the Comex is relatively light on deliveries whereas Shanghai seems to be accelerating

As a reminder, the London Bullion Market Association is the bigger Western delivery exchange, but its records are not yet available to us for analysis like this.

The source of these charts is the master data wrangler, Nick Laird.