An alert reader I communicate with [who shall remain anonymous] has been documenting the length of the published GLD bar list:
- on Friday, Sept. 25 – the list was 1,381 pages long
- on Friday, Oct. 2 – the list was 208 pages long
- on Friday, Oct. 9 – the list was 195 pages long
- then, on Wednesday, Oct. 14 – after questions were being raised about the strange machinations with the bar list in chat rooms on the internet – the list was back up to 855 pages long
Something TRULY stinks here. No explanation has been offered for the DRAMATIC swings in this list. Where gold is concerned nothing happens by accident.
Such anomaly if it's true would be totally outrageous. Before going into total panic, obviously one should do the due diligence first. Therefore, I spent a couple of weeks observing the gold bar list at the GLD, which can be downloaded right here from spdrgoldshares.com. I was able to obtain 2 different copies of GLD bar list. One is 855 pages long, and another is 1291 pages long, both of which can be downloaded from my site by clicking on the links.
The first thing that I noticed was that on the 855 page version, it is attributing to Bank of New York, while the 1291 page version, it is stating the rightful new owner as HSBC. This seems to be extreme slopiness on the part of GLD. Yes, HSBC has bought the ETF, but it has been quite awhile (I couldn't google a link to verify the above, but only recalled reading GLD being bought out by the new owner.) Anyway, I don't think anybody would make such a mistake in title regarding one's own assets.
The second thing is obviously that the two versions did confirm what Rob Kirby said about very different length in the bar list itself. I was not able to get the versions with much shorter list. I tried Internet Archive Wayback Machine, and it didn't have any archives for the bar list link. So I guess any archiving for observation will need to be done by oneself.
Once I begun to actually count the number of gold bars, it became clear to me that the page length has nothing to do with the number of bars. On the 855 page version, there are about 104 bars per page, while on the 1291 page version, there are about 69 bars per page.
