Trading 212, the FCA-regulated broker today announced on their website that they are not allowing any new BUY positions to be taken on Silver and that the precious metal has been placed in close-only mode.
Today's move by the London-based firm comes as the price of Silver hit an 8-year high in Monday's trading, fueled by posts on the WallStreetBets group on Reddit calling for betting on silver as a way to hurt big banks they believe are artificially suppressing prices.
Prices of the precious metal rose as high as 13.5% on Monday, following a 6% rally at the end of last week. According to data from BlackRock, the iShares Silver Trust, the world’s largest silver-backed Exchange -traded fund, saw nearly $1bn in inflows on Friday alone. The 37.05m increase in the number of shares of the iShares Silver Trust on Friday was the biggest single-day increase since the ETF started trading in April 2006.
Reddit's WallStreetBets, the group behind the GameStop drama, has been one of the leaders of the targeting of Silver with its subreddit discussion: 'The biggest short squeeze in the world $SLV Silver $25 to 1000$.'
Trading 212 was forced to temporarily halt the on-boarding of new users on Friday, after a massive influx of Redditors attempted to buy GameStop, Blackberry, Nokia and AMC stocks. Now, amid unprecedented demand for Silver, the brokerage has placed a stop on all new BUY positions.
A statement on the Trading 212 website simply said: "Silver has been placed in close-only mode, meaning that new Buy positions can't be opened but existing ones can be closed."
At the time of press, it is not known when BUY positions will be allowed on the Trading 212 platform or indeed where this latest move is leading. The hashtag #silversqueeze is trending on Twitter and has garnered support from the likes of the Winklevoss twins.
"If the silver market is proven to be fraudulent, you better believe the gold market will be next," Cameron Winklevoss also tweeted.
Meanwhile, not everyone is a fan of recent events. Senator Elizabeth Warren has called for the SEC to investigate, telling CNN: "We actually don't know who all the players are in all this — whether there's big money on both sides."
