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So if the COMEX commercials saw this gold pullback coming, they sure didn t take additional advantage of it ahead of time by piling on the short side.

Indeed, the LCNS peaked on February 19 at 252,740 contracts net short and 51.60% of the total open contracts when gold was in the $920s. As the metal moved over $100 the ounce higher the LCNS got smaller, not larger.

What is kind of interesting about that is that the COMEX commercials are sometimes accused of engineering, orchestrating, and manipulating price moves in the metals markets by some conspiracy minded analysts. Ostensibly that would of course be in order to make money from the fall in price they caused.

If the COMEX commercials caused this latest gold plunge, why didn t they pile on the short side in a really big way just ahead of it? They certainly could have, but as we can see they didn t.

There are some pretty savvy long time traders which correspond with this report that think that because the COMEX commercials didn t pile on the short side ahead of this latest pullback, the pullback itself is going to be very brief and may even be already over. We ll see. As this is being written, gold has recovered back up into the lower $930s.

Gold ETFs. Over the past week gold holdings at streetTRACKS Gold Shares, the largest gold exchange traded fund [NYSE:GLD], did show a net weekly reduction of 16.27 to 637.13 tonnes, but GLD started the week with an addition of 10.43 tonnes and metal holdings peaked at 663.83 tonnes, so the authorized market participants of the largest gold ETF found it necessary to shrink the float (to keep pace with selling action) and to reduce gold holdings by 26.7 tonnes during the rush lower for gold. As of Monday s figures that s equal to $18.96 billion U.S. dollars worth of gold bars held by a custodian in London for the trust.

Gold holdings for the U.K. equivalent to GLD, LyxOR Gold Bullion Securities Limited, showed a 1.11 tonne add to 115.71 tonnes of gold held. Barclay s iShares COMEX Gold Trust [AMEX:IAU] gold holdings increased a relatively large 4.61 to 67.13 tonnes of gold metal held for its investors.

Because of the modest (relative to the drop in gold) reduction in gold holdings by GLD all of the gold ETFs sponsored by the World Gold Council booked a net reduction of 14.4 to 801.4 tonnes of allocated gold metal. As of Monday s figures, that was worth $23.8 billion.

Considering the very large pullback for gold metal, a net reduction of just over 14 tonnes in the WGC ETFs just doen t seem like all that much, does it?

Silver ETF: Metal holdings for Barclay s iShares Silver Trust [AMEX:SLV], the U.S. silver ETF, added 107.86 to 5,578.95 tonnes of silver metal held for its investors over the past week. That was as silver was bludgeoned for a $3.89 net loss for the calendar week ending Thursday, March 20, a jaw clenching 18.8% for the holiday shortened week on the cash market.