Gold’s COMEX Registered Stock Turns Higher for the First Time Since Spring
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For three consecutive weeks this analysis has tracked a gold market in which Western paper positioning did all the work and Asian physical demand did none of it — a configuration that produced a 7.1% correction from $4,652 and, as of last week, offered no visible mechanism for arresting it. This week the first genuine repair signals appeared, and they came from the warehouse rather than the price. COMEX registered gold has bounced off its late-summer lows with a series of positive daily inflows, lifting registered stock to 15.12 million ounces against eligible of 12.26 million for a combined 27,377,527 troy ounces. Shanghai’s futures open interest simultaneously jumped 7,892 lots to 403,238 — the 92nd percentile of its 52-week range — while SHFE vault stock sits at 114.8 tonnes, the 97th percentile, and the price of SHFE gold sits at only the 44th. The Shanghai premium has meanwhile crept back to +0.35% on Au99.99 and +0.26% on Au(T+D), the first clearly positive readings in a month. Gold’s COMEX EFP basis for OCT26 has compressed to $8.01 from roughly $35 in mid-July. Taken together this is not a demand recovery, but it is the end of the deterioration — and the specific shape of it tells you a great deal about where the risk now sits.
The InProved Terminal’s Precious Metals Vaults monitor for COMEX warehouse stocks, current to September 9 and captured September 11, records a combined gold total of 27,377,527 troy ounces, up 71 ounces versus the prior session. The split matters more than the headline: registered stock — the category actually pledged against futures delivery — stands at 15.12 million ounces, or 55.2% of total, against eligible of 12.26 million, or 44.8%. The vault composition chart running from January 2026 renders the year’s arc with unusual clarity. Combined stock began the year near 38 million ounces and declined almost without interruption through the first half, reaching a trough near 27 million in June and July. Registered stock fell alongside it from roughly 20 million to a low near 13 million in June, a drawdown of more than a third. What the InProved Terminal flags this week is the change in slope: registered has turned up from that base and the net flow panel shows a cluster of green bars in August and early September replacing the near-continuous red that dominated from January through June.
The analytical significance of a registered-stock recovery is different from, and in some ways more important than, a price recovery. Registered metal is the fuel of the delivery mechanism; when it drains, each contract standing for delivery consumes a larger share of what is available, and the market becomes progressively more vulnerable to a squeeze on any contract month that attracts genuine delivery intent. When it rebuilds, that vulnerability recedes and the futures curve normalises. The correct reading of the current data is therefore not bullish in the price sense but structurally stabilising: the six-month drain that ran from January through June has stopped, metal is flowing back into the registered category, and the delivery mechanism is being recapitalised. That this is happening while gold trades roughly 7% below its August peak is the informative part — it means the metal moving back into registered is not chasing price but responding to the improved economics of carrying gold against a futures curve that has itself changed shape, a point the EFP data makes explicit.
The InProved Terminal’s gold EFP monitor for September 11 shows the full spot-versus-futures term structure: SPOT-OCT26 at $8.01 against a prior of $7.11, SPOT-DEC26 at $41.26 against $40.35, SPOT-FEB27 at $71.25 against $75.50, and SPOT-APR27 at $108.00 against $109.56. The OCT26 basis history is the arresting panel. The series began the window on July 13 near $35 per ounce and has descended in an almost unbroken staircase through late July, August, and early September to today’s $8.01 — a compression of roughly 77% in under two months. The intraday basis panel for the current session shows OCT26 oscillating between $6.6 and $8.6, drifting higher through the morning before a sharp late dip. The EFP spread measures what a holder of physical gold is paid to swap it into a futures position, and it is fundamentally a funding and carry instrument: it compensates the physical holder for interest, storage, and the opportunity cost of holding metal rather than cash.
A basis compressing from $35 to $8 on the front contract means one of two things, and distinguishing between them is the central analytical question for gold right now. Either the cost of carry has fallen — which would require a sharp decline in short-term funding rates — or the physical market has tightened to the point where holders of metal are no longer willing to lend it into the futures market at the old rate. The macro data released this week argues strongly against the first explanation: US PPI accelerated to 5.4% year-on-year against 5.3% expected, FedWatch odds of a September rate hike moved to 70%, and the 10-year Treasury yield has been pushing toward 5.0%, printing 4.967% on September 11. Funding costs are rising, not falling. The compression in the EFP basis is therefore happening in the face of a rising carry cost, which isolates physical tightness as the driver and is the single most bullish structural datapoint in this week’s gold material. The implied volatility term structure on the same dashboard adds the market’s own read: OCT26 at 26.4%, DEC26 at 24.5%, FEB27 at 23.7%, and APR27 at 23.8% — a downward-sloping curve in which near-dated volatility is priced meaningfully above far-dated, the classic signature of a market expecting near-term event risk rather than a sustained regime change.
The InProved Terminal’s SHFE precious metals dashboard for September 10 produces the most striking percentile mismatch in this week’s data. SHFE gold au2610 closed at 957.18 CNY per gram — $4,439.55 per ounce — up 5.34 CNY (+0.56%), or $24.77 per ounce, and the contract is flagged as being in contango. Total futures open interest stands at 403,238 lots after a jump of 7,892 lots (+2.00%), up 4.8% on the week, 7.0% month-to-date and 28.2% year-to-date. SHFE vault stock sits at 114.8 tonnes, unchanged on the day, up 1.0% month-to-date and 17.6% year-to-date. The open-interest-to-vault ratio is 1.76:1, up 0.03 (+2.00%). Now read the percentile row beneath: the price of 957.18 sits at the 44th percentile of its 52-week range of 826.82 to 1,249.12; open interest of 403,238 sits at the 92nd percentile of a range running 271,715 to 481,753; vault stock of 114.8 tonnes sits at the 97th percentile of 53.8 to 114.9; and the OI-to-vault ratio of 1.76:1 sits at the 68th percentile of 1.21:1 to 5.13:1.
A market in which open interest is at the 92nd percentile and vault stock at the 97th while price sits at the 44th is describing something specific: enormous and growing participation, fully backed by metal, at a price the participants evidently do not consider expensive. The year-to-date figures sharpen it — open interest up 28.2%, vault stock up 17.6%, price down 2.1%. Chinese futures engagement with gold has expanded by more than a quarter this year while the price in yuan has gone nowhere, and the vaults have expanded to absorb almost exactly the growth in paper. This is the structural counterpoint to the SGE withdrawal collapse documented last week, when August offtake printed 62.1 tonnes at the 2.8th percentile of three years. Both facts are true simultaneously and they are not contradictory: Chinese participants are not taking metal out of the exchange system, but they are building record positions inside it and the exchange is holding record metal against those positions. Demand has not disappeared; it has changed form, from physical withdrawal into exchange-based accumulation. The vault stock at the 97th percentile is the proof — that metal came from somewhere, and it is being held against a rapidly expanding open interest rather than delivered out.
The InProved Terminal’s Shanghai/LBMA spread table for September 10 lists Au99.99 at 946.00 CNY per gram, equivalent to $4,383.87 per ounce, against an LBMA benchmark of $4,368.64 — a premium of 0.35%. The deferred Au(T+D) contract traded at 945.20 CNY per gram, or $4,380.16, against the same benchmark for 0.26%. Silver Ag(T+D) printed 15,750.00 CNY per kilogram, or $73.00 per ounce, against LBMA at $64.71 — 12.81%. Set the gold readings against the sequence this analysis has tracked: -0.18% on August 21, a six-month low; -0.02% on August 28; +0.04% and +0.07% on August 31; +0.13% on September 2; and now +0.35% and +0.26% on September 10. The premium has traced a clean recovery from a six-month discount back into genuinely positive territory over three weeks, and the current Au99.99 reading is the highest since the first half of August.
The significance of a premium recovering to +0.35% should be calibrated carefully rather than overstated, because the level still sits far below what constituted normal Chinese demand through 2024 and the first half of 2025, when premiums of +0.5% to +2.0% were routine and spikes above +3% accompanied genuine buying urgency. A reading of +0.35% is not a demand surge. What it does establish is that the arbitrage direction has flipped: at a discount, gold could profitably leave China, and at +0.35% it can profitably enter, which restores — modestly — the eastward pull on London metal that was entirely absent through late August. Read alongside the SHFE dashboard, the mechanism becomes coherent: Chinese participants are building futures positions at the 92nd percentile and the exchange is accumulating vault metal at the 97th, which requires metal to flow in, which requires a positive premium to pay for it. The premium recovery and the vault build are the same phenomenon observed from two angles. For gold investors, this is the first evidence in a month that the Asian bid — the shock absorber whose absence this analysis flagged as the reason the correction found no floor — is beginning to reassemble itself, even if at a fraction of its former intensity.
For bullion dealers, the shift from last week is meaningful enough to change the stocking posture from wait to begin. Last week’s advice was to hold cash and let the correction run because the two Asian demand centres had withdrawn entirely and there was no mechanism to arrest the decline. Three things have changed: COMEX registered stock has turned up from its June lows, the Shanghai premium has recovered from a six-month discount to +0.35%, and SHFE vault stock sits at the 97th percentile with open interest at the 92nd. None of these is a price signal, but collectively they describe a physical market that has stopped deteriorating. The commercial implication is that the window for acquiring inventory at post-correction wholesale levels is more likely to be measured in weeks than months, and dealers who deferred restocking should begin staging purchases rather than waiting for a confirmed price bottom that by construction arrives after the cheap metal is gone. Sovereign coin — Eagles, Krugerrands, Britannias — remains the right priority for turn. A working planning range of $4,250 to $4,700 through the fourth quarter, with purchases staged across the $4,300 to $4,450 zone, balances the improving structure against the fact that retail demand has not yet returned.
For conservative investors, the case for resuming accumulation is now materially stronger than it was a week ago, and the EFP data is the reason. A front-month basis compressing from $35 to $8.01 while funding costs rise — PPI at 5.4%, rate-hike odds at 70%, the 10-year pressing toward 5.0% — can only be explained by physical tightness, because the alternative explanation requires falling carry costs that demonstrably are not falling. That is a genuine structural signal rather than a sentiment reading, and it is the sort of thing that tends to be visible in the plumbing well before it is visible in the price. Combined with registered stock rebuilding and the Shanghai premium back above parity, the physical backdrop has moved from actively deteriorating to quietly repairing. Investors who deferred additions on last week’s guidance should begin staged accumulation into the $4,300 to $4,450 zone rather than waiting for the SGE withdrawal percentile to recover, which is a monthly series and will confirm far too late to be useful. A twelve-month target of $4,900 to $5,150 is unchanged and sits below the 52-week high of $5,415.17. The indicator to monitor is the OCT26 EFP basis: a move below $5 would signal acute tightening, while a recovery above $20 would indicate the physical squeeze had eased and the structural case had weakened.
For active traders, the setup has improved but the volatility term structure counsels caution on timing. OCT26 implied volatility at 26.4% against APR27 at 23.8% is a downward-sloping curve, which prices meaningful near-term event risk — most obviously the September Federal Reserve meeting, with hike odds at 70% following the hot PPI print. That configuration argues for expressing a bullish view through defined-risk structures rather than outright futures length until the event passes, because the market is explicitly paying up for near-dated protection and a hawkish outcome would hit gold before the improving physical structure could support it. The levels are clear: immediate resistance sits at $4,450, then $4,550, with $4,700 the extension if the physical repair continues and the Fed disappoints the hawks. Support is $4,250, with the deeper shelf at $4,100 to $4,150 where the July base was built. The highest-quality read on whether the physical thesis is working is the EFP basis rather than the price — a continued grind below $8.01 on OCT26 while the curve stays in contango tells you metal is getting harder to source regardless of what the screen shows, and traders who track that series will see the turn before the chart does.
Hugo Pascal’s observation about the AU9999 contract hitting a 10-week volume high underscores the increasing significance of physical gold trading on the Shanghai Gold Exchange. This trend not only highlights robust domestic demand in China but also reflects broader shifts in the global gold market toward physical-backed assets.
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