JP Morgan allegedly closing a huge silver short at the exact intraday bottom of the biggest silver crash in 44 years is the kind of detail that makes even veteran metals traders sit up a little straighter. When you add in the London Metal Exchange going dark, HSBC’s systems going offline, and a sudden, aggressive CME margin hike on the same day, according to a recent analysis on YouTube by Felix & Friends (Goat Academy). The story stops looking like “volatility” and starts to look, many argue, like an allegedly engineered reset of the paper silver market.
The 6-Sigma Silver Plunge
In late January 2026, silver spiked to around $117 an ounce, then rose to around $120 on Thursday, before crashing to roughly $78 on Friday, a 35% intraday wipeout that Felix Prehn describes as the worst silver day since 1980. Gold dropped about 12% in the same window. The move in silver alone was so violent that @NoLimitGains on X framed it as a “6-sigma” event, lumped together with similar once-in-a-lifetime moves in long-dated Japanese government bonds and gold during the same week.
Mainstream headlines quickly blamed the carnage on macro: Donald Trump’s nomination of Kevin Warsh, seen as a hawkish replacement for Jerome Powell at the Federal Reserve, allegedly torpedoed expectations of easy money and sent the dollar sharply higher. In this narrative, crowded long positions in gold and silver simply imploded when the Fed’s “poodle” morphed into a rottweiler, catching over-leveraged bulls off guard.
But the sequence of market plumbing events that day, systems going down, margins going up, shorts allegedly closing into the panic, suggests to many that the macro story was, at best, a convenient cover, according to Felix’s YouTube analysis.
Systems Offline Coincidence?
Felix’s on-ski-lift monologue lays out a chain of events that, if you are of a conspiratorial bent, looks less like chaos and more like choreography. Henotes that as silver began to roll over on Friday, the London Metal Exchange, one of the world’s key venues for silver trading, had a pre-market glitch delaying the start of electronic trading, while HSBC, a major London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) participant, also reported systems down at the same time in Hong Kong.
In parallel, CME Group’sCOMEX division hiked margin requirements on silver futures just as liquidity was thinning into the weekend, forcing highly leveraged traders to either wire in fresh collateral within hours or dump contracts into a falling market.
By Felix’s account, JP Morgan appeared to close its silver short exposure almost perfectly at the intraday low on Friday, an outcome critics suggest is more consistent with a deliberate “flush” than with a random scramble for the exits.
“This wasn’t a market failure. It was an engineered flush, I think we should call it… The mainstream media won’t tell you this… JP Morgan just closed their short position in silver at the exact market bottom on Friday and they’re pinning it on the Fed chair… but the weapon was actually the margin hike.”
The same day, algo-driven selling had extra fuel: a Reuters report claimed the U.S. was stepping back from plans to guarantee a minimum price for U.S. critical mineral projects, a story the U.S. Department of Energy later called “false and…deliberately misleading.” If that official pushback is taken at face value, it suggests someone, somewhere, allegedly had an interest in triggering automated selling in a market that was already wobbling.
According to Felix on his YouTube video, “Just think about this… Reuters pushed out a report claiming the U.S. was ending support for strategic metals… Now the Energy Department said it’s false and deliberately misleading… Just think about that for a second. The government says this is deliberately misleading… Why would you deliberately mislead unless you had some interest in the outcome, right? …But the algo trading systems had already triggered, the mass sell orders were already hitting the CME… so with all this chaos happening, you had yourself a nice big cake for the shorts who could close their positions and enjoy this flash.”
Hunt Brothers Redux or Paper Reset?
The pattern the metals veterans point to is not new. When the Hunt brothers tried to corner silver in 1980, the exchangeinvoked “liquidation only” rules, effectively banning new long positions and crushing the price by about 80% as margin calls cascaded through the system. In 2011, after silver ripped from roughly $18 to$49 post-GFC, CME raised margins five times in two weeks; silver promptly halved as leveraged longs were flushed, Felix revealed, in his YouTube analysis.
December 2025 alreadylooked like a rehearsal for this winter’s drama. This time, Felix argues, the “margin discovery” was even more aggressive.
What’s different in 2026, both Felix and the NoLimitGains/Hal Turner camp stress, is that this does not look like a purely speculative bubble. The silver market has allegedly run a roughly 164-million-ounce annual supply deficit for five consecutive years, driven by demand from solar panels, EVs, and AI-driven data centers.
The Cartel Bid and 350:1 Ratio
Analysis of early-2026 pricing shows COMEX silver trading far below physical prices in Shanghai. One study describes a 350:1 paper-to-physical ratio in silver contracts.
That imbalance has long fuelled allegations that a banking “cartel” uses synthetic supply to suppress prices. In the immediate aftermath of the January crash, X accounts like @silvertradesuggested the violent intraday dump was the “cartel [is] attempting to take silver from >$120 to below $90.” They further predicted shortages of all physical silver at every major dealer by Sunday, supposedly the February 1, 2026. A prediction that unfolded through widespread dealer shortages by February 1.
COMEX delivery data cited by MEXC research shows JP Morgan was heavily involved in February deliveries totaling 633 contracts at $78.29.
Critics emphasise that none of this proves a single coordinated conspiracy.
Silver Reset Feature Not Bug?
The most provocative claim in both Felix’s analysis and the NoLimitGains/Hal Turner commentary is that this was not a failure of the silver market but a feature of the way the modern metals casino is designed. Felix suggests that this process is slowly killing paper silver for ordinary investors.
Importantly, though, the U.S. Department of Justice and CFTC previously fined JP Morgan $920 million for manipulating gold and silver prices over eight years between 2008 and 2016.
Whether you buy the full “cartel” narrative or not, the data points are real enough to justify hard questions about who, exactly, benefits from a 6-sigma metals event that conveniently lets the largest short players tidy up their books at the lows, while headlines blame it all on a Fed chair nomination and a bout of investor irrationality.
Author: Ayanfe Fakunle
The editorial team at #DisruptionBanking has taken all precautions to ensure that no persons or organizations have been adversely affected or offered any sort of financial advice in this article. This article is most definitely not financial advice.
See Also:
Warsh Triggers Massive Market Crash Metals and Crypto Plunge | Disruption Banking
The Banks and the Silver Surge: Rumors vs. Reality | Disruption Banking
