https://no01.substack.com/p/go-big-or-go-home

No1
Sep 23, 2026

As a thanks to my paid subscribers they received this article yesterday. After a day, it opens up for everybody else.

You all should know - and most probably do know - that I’m a big fan of precious metals. Silver especially.

Much more accessible to common folks like me than “the money of kings” (gold).

What I’m not a fan of, is manipulation.

And if you’ve been with me for a while now, you know that silver saw a HUGE step-down in January. Read up if you weren’t and you don’t:
This one's for the history books!
No1
·
Jan 30
This one's for the history books!

Friday, January 30, 2026 will go down in history as the day silver experienced what statisticians would call “impossible”.
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This one’s for you, crude!
Raises glass (just club soda with a slice of lemon this time)…

On Tuesday an enormous amount of firepower went into making a number on a screen smaller. And trust me (bro!), it was ENORMOUS.

Silver is easily manipulated, but oil… Man, oil… That’s such a necessity for our economy that you can’t just open a few million shorts and expect it to have a reasonable effect. Starts with a B there to have this kind of effect.

Well, we’ve been here before, and crude has been losing already for over a week now. Both crude, gasoline and diesel went down like 15% for the week.

And STILL someone decided WTI belonged under $90.

It got there.

All that effort bought a drop in the average US diesel price of half a cent.
Image
source

A rounding error.

The day before, retail diesel had set a fresh record above $6.50 a gallon, but that’s only the average. Large parts of the country pay between $6.64 and $9.20.

Those are the numbers that farmers and truckers actually pay.

Futures do what futures do. No matter what number is on the screen, a Peterbilt doesn’t run on paper (not as far as I know).

So what did exactly happen (or didn’t happen)?

That’s worth walking through. Because they’re really getting desperate here I feel.
Monday Sept 14:

“Pakistani sources” again report on a potential deal between the US & Iran. Don’t know who’s still listening, but presumably oil. Trump also tweeted that Ukraine and Russia would stop hitting each other’s energy infrastructure.

Laughable. Even at the time. Remember that Russia blocks diesel exports (good way to turn the screws even if the Europeans start to talk sense and remove oil sanctions from Russia to alleviate their diesel (and soon-to-be gas) shortages :insert shocked face.

Also Sept 14: The Houthis took the whole Red Sea coast giving them fire control over it. The East-West pipeline in Saudi was still shut down. And a Gulf-Iran meeting was postponed (“to result in nothing at a later date” as I mentioned here:
Quadwitching
Quadwitching
No1
·
Sep 15
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Tuesday Sept 15:

Wright told anyone that still listened to CNBC that the pipeline outage would be “measured in days”.

WTI rose 4.5% (woops). Shanghai crude hit $135 (vs $106 for CL) (woops²). Oman crude hit $155 (woops³).

Also Sept 15: Saudi cancelled September contracts to Europe. And analysts expect the pipeline to be offline for up to a month (they’re paid to be optimistic!).
Wednesday Sept 16:

Because No1 heard Wright talk, Bloomberg copy/pasted the PR release, and crude slid. Saudis seemed to offer cargoes through Oman. (remember those 20 trillion barrels a day that Trump says are exiting under cover of the night? - Yeah. Colour me suspicious).

Also Sept 16: Shanghai $134 vs $104 WTI. Urals traded above Brent (woops, how are those Russian sanctions working out?). SPR & Cushing near “tank bottoms” (link).
Thursday Sept 17:

WTI OPEX. Not too much going on. Didn’t want to upset the apple-quad too much.

Also Sept 17: Diesel “OUT” signs started to appear in Texas, Florida and California.
Image
source
Friday Sept 18:

China (and Pakistan) asked Iran to tone down the Houthis, and Iran’s president and foreign minister were granted UNGA visas.

Also Sept 18: Diesel above $6 in all but 2 states: Texas = $5.98, Oklahoma = $5.99…

Not much going on - yet. Everyone holding their breath… Is THIS weekend the BIG one?
Weekend:

Yemen strikes were ordered, then cancelled on Sunday.

Houthis and Riyadh were exchanging “love taps” and holding barbeques next to the airport.
source

Iran declared a “Code 100”, which is a code for “highest military alert”. I’m still trying to figure out if that’s binary or not and if the US has more DEFCONs than Iran?
Monday Sept 21:

Iran and the US were hoping to meet. Iran would just reiterate their maximal demands, and the US pretends to listen.
Oil got walked down as there was no big-bang everyone was expecting.

Also Sept 21:
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source

Oil in backwardation till at least March ’27.

Urals at $115, above Brent.

And seems we don’t have enough tankers (without holes - but that’s implied).
Tuesday Sept 22:

A FLURRY of headlines. Something’s about to break…

Kyodo: Iran would reopen Hormuz “within seven days” if “the US gives it everything it wants” (paraphrased of course).

(sidenote: Kyodo is a Japanese news agency - and guess who is completely dependent on importing energy? The release 2h earlier in Japan was completely ignored, but used as a pretext in the West when it came out to dump prices)

Aramco told Asian refiners that Yanbu (the port in the Red Sea) loadings would come “soon”.

A Saudi rag claimed that the pipeline was back at full capacity. Nobody dared to copy/paste that one. Too egregious, even for them.

Trump called his Iran talks “very productive” and backed a diesel ban.
Today:

Iran denies dropping its preconditions. (I mean, would you?) [link]

One of the still-floating hulks got hit in Hormuz.

VLCC rates hit $1.2m/day.

Wright: “A diesel ban definitely doesn’t work” (duh! translation: we’ll ban diesel exports next)
source

(average) US diesel at the pump dropped $0.005.

Diesel is 3.5% MORE expensive than a week ago, but oil is DOWN 11.5%. Yup. Pretty normal.

When 200 trillion barrels are transferring through the night on super-mega-maxi-YUUGE tankers. Yeah. Kinda makes sense. In algo/clown world at least!

The pipeline that is “temporarily” out of commission due to an increase in temperature (and some additional holes) is both back up and running in under a week - in the desert, mind you! - and will take a month to repair.

It’s so ready that Europe can’t get any of the good stuff anymore - with whispers saying that that force majeure would run into 2027.

I’m coining the term “The East-West pipedream”.

Each day there are recycled headlines that the Strait would open, or the pipeline would reopen or that “talks were progressing well” (translation: no they did not, but we need the algos to take a dump on the price).

But then we also have Russia blocking diesel exports, China coming back to the market requesting more…

Any reason is good enough to shake loose some contracts? But this is not like silver that can easily be stored? So the only reason I see is pure financial speculation and saving of the shorts.

There’s also a Twitter storm raging on about a diesel export ban. Bessent said he was examining whether it’s feasible. The Senate Majority Leader was already “open” to it, and Grassley has been tweeting about it for days.

Today Trump’s own Energy Secretary told Reuters a ban definitely doesn’t work (no shit Sherlock) and would push gasoline and jet fuel prices UP.

Let’s segway here… The US imports a lot of heavy crude for its refineries to produce diesel. Lots of it comes from Mexico. So let’s ban diesel exports to Mexico. How long do you think Mexico will sell that crude?

But my personal favourite came from the White House itself. Axios reported that because the US “continues to maintain full control” of the Strait of Hormuz, oil and gas prices will fall back to pre-conflict levels.

This morning a cargo ship in that fully controlled Strait was hit by an unknown projectile. The crew got off with two casualties and the vessel was left burning and adrift.

Full control… Like the weather forecast being in control of the weather, right?

Random (completely and totally unrelated) sidenote: the midterms are six weeks away, and Trump’s approval hit 32% this week.

Diesel is the one price every farmer, trucker and delivery van in every swing district sees every single day. Anything a US politician says between now and November is campaigning, and rationality isn’t invited.

Much like with the silver drop, the way the selling was done is more interesting than the selling itself.

Options (the tail that wags the dog) are priced as if peace had broken out, and the people with the most skin in the game are positioned as if it hadn’t.

The usual word for this is complacency, as if an entire market somehow forgot there’s a war on. Nobody forgot. Someone is walking the price down with headlines and cheap paper, in broad daylight, in the one commodity every other price on the planet is built on. When they did it to silver we called it manipulation. Same word, bigger crime scene.
Running on empty
Running on empty
No1
·
Aug 19
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The other big lever is running on fumes (see link above to my previous article).
source

The SPR released 0.4 million barrels last week, down more than 95% from the weekly peak in May. Those caverns I was talking about before probably have a 285 limit (I thought 300 before - 243 is the authorised limit).

The last attempt to lease out SPR barrels, a few months back, flopped.

Borrowing a barrel now and handing it back later is effectively a short, and the commodity houses don’t believe this disruption ends any time soon.
Quadwitching
Quadwitching
No1
·
Sep 15
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Last week crude went into quad witching pinned under a pile of short calls (link above). And I figured Friday’s expiry would take a lot of those stones off.

Instead someone found more weight.

Crude’s bearish flow is now stacked into this Friday’s options, Brent’s front-month expires next Wednesday, and generally the gap between futures and physical closes when contracts roll.

Because at expiration, an ACTUAL barrel has to be delivered. Perhaps that’s why the urgency?
source

Even the EIA pitched in today, with a surprise build of almost 3 million barrels in US crude stocks against an expected draw.

Oil went up 2%.

I’ve seen this movie before though, back in January, with silver in the starring role.
(Pet) rock, paper, scissors
(Pet) rock, paper, scissors
No1
·
Jan 30
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Margin hikes stacked on margin hikes, China suspended trading in a handful of commodity funds, and the official story was a Fed chair nomination.

Shanghai was paying 18-23% over COMEX at the time, and dealers in Asia had waiting lists measured in months.

Shanghai’s premium shrank from about $15 to $9 in the week after, but it didn’t close.
Oops! They did it again!
Oops! They did it again!
No1
·
Feb 5
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The people gave in.

Silver is at $65 today. Shanghai closed at $74.81. Eight months on, the premium is still around nine dollars, 13% and change.

No1 cares. Maybe China is keeping that premium high to keep the flow going? I can’t prove it.

But that drop sure crashed the party.

Nobody can print silver. Neither can they print oil.

Urals (still sanctioned, heavy, sour Russian grade) traded at a 30% discount not so long ago. And a few days ago it was priced around $115. Ukraine and Russia keep exchanging fireworks on refineries and petrol stations every other night.

Crude in Dubai and Shanghai trades at $120-125.

WTI futures, in the meantime, got shoved under $90.

By the way, WTI Midland CAN be delivered into Brent. It just needs a ship, a month at sea, and an insurer willing to pick up the phone. The ship alone is a problem. A VLCC now costs around $1.2 million a day to charter, ten times the pre-war rate and up from the $800k record of witching week, and a five-to-nine-year-old tanker sells for 20-35% more than a brand new one, because the brand new one takes three years to show up.

The analogy with silver breaks on two things though: size and time.

Oil is big. Really big. Every ounce of silver mined and recycled in a year is worth something like $65-70 billion at today’s price.

The world burns through that much oil in about a week, then does it again the week after, and the week after that, which is the part that paper keeps forgetting.

You can lean on the silver market with a couple of big balance sheets and an exchange that hikes margins on request.

Leaning on a market worth north of $3 trillion a year is more like trying to stop a planet turning by sitting on it very firmly.

Time is also of the essence here.

Silver is a stock.

It sits in a vault, and if you can’t get your ounce this month you can wait, and it’s still an ounce next year. That’s exactly why crashing the mood worked: I can wait, so I do. And I’ve now been waiting eight months (again).

Oil on the contrary is a flow.

It gets pumped, refined and set on fire, mostly within weeks. Generally in engines. Now by drones too.

Oil can’t wait for sentiment to recover. Neither can the truck, the ferry or the hospital generator. The EIA reckons global inventories have already fallen by some 400 million barrels this year.

Anyone hedging via futures can’t properly hedge anymore, because they buy at $120, but the hedge is $90. So they buy less. Their tanks get emptier.

You can scare the silver buyer out of the market for years.

A diesel buyer still needs their fill come next Monday.

Which is why that half cent is crucial.

The physical didn’t move. Even though the price dropped 15-20% (relative).
US10Y, 1h

Which is why it’s strange that the 10Y yield jumped to 5.07% this afternoon. Same for the 2-year and the 30-year. All back to 2007 levels…

Nothing important happened in 2007, right?

The “official” explanation is a blowout PMI, with US output growing at its fastest pace in more than five years.

The same report also says that input costs jumped at the steepest rate in four years (diesel enters the chat).

Bessent keeps calling this the best bond market in the world. Also “under full control”, presumably.
1/US10Y, XAUUSD, XAGUSD

When bonds, gold and silver all sell off together, it usually means someone needs cash. FAST.

Those are the things you dump when you need to raise some real wad of cash FAST without wrecking the price.

Maybe it’s the yen again?
Yentervention
Yentervention
No1
·
Sep 9
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Or maybe somebody expects an interesting weekend?

I’ve no idea, but I’m sure they’re not mutually exclusive.

Which brings me to last Thursday when Trump told Axios he had a big decision coming up: “Do I want to go in and annihilate them or do I not?”

On Saturday evening he cut his Camp David weekend short and flew back to the White House.

(I didn’t check the gay bars in Washington nor the pizza deliveries, but I guess business shifted from the former to the latter.)

US embassies across the region issued security alerts.
Netanyahu cut his US trip short.
Iran moved to its highest military alert.

Compare that to:

The SPR is nearly empty and nobody wants to lease (= short) what’s left.
Headlines now have a shelf life of max 24 hours.
The diesel ban got vetoed by his own cabinet before anyone drafted it.
Brent’s front-month expires next Wednesday.
The Saudis want air cover and haven’t got it.

Oh, and Bessent announced that any country letting Iranian airliners in from today gets “knocked out of the dollar system”. China said yes-yes, and Iranian flights landed there today anyway (Xi is having tea this week in Washington).

Yup Bessent is going to drop China. Would LOVE to see him try!!

Israel votes next month.
The midterms are six weeks out.

When jawboning stops working, the only applicable lever that’s left is the one that goes bang.

Go big or go home.

The paper shorts are betting on another TACO.

Whoever was dumping Treasuries and gold this afternoon might be betting on big.

One of them is going to be very wrong.