Zero Hedge has been on fire recently. This will be interesting to watch.

Summary of the worst case scenario: JP Morgan received approval to settle silver futures contracts with shares of SLV. However, what if it simply printed extra shares of SLV without actually having those shares backed by physical silver? 11% of the entries in the bar listing for SLV appear to be duplicate entries. When other statistical anomalies are taken into consideration, the SLV holdings are reduced by 82%.

Summary of the better scenario: the accounting at JP Morgan is criminally incompetent.

FYI: while it is possible for manufacturers to repeat serial numbers, there are reasons to believe that duplicate serial numbers are unlikely to occur on bars with the same exact weight. The sheer length of the list of duplicates is rather alarming.

Full disclosure: I have a (single) covered call in SLV that expires in January, so I’m not exactly keen on finding out the whole thing is a scam before then. I actually hope that there’s a simple explanation.