for more on the gold silver ratio, i want to bring and ken hoffman, who joins us now in skillman, newersey. what does the gold silver ratio ?ell you why it's important ken: if you want to trade using the gold silver ratio, i guarantee you will lose money. it doesn't tell you anything at all about one is not a versus the other. if you want to know that industry demand trends, the ratio is very good. if the ratio is telling you that demand for gold relative to silver has been much greater, why? look at china. chinese imports of gold since 2010 are up more than 1000%. areese imports of silver down by more than 50%. they are almost down two thirds. if the ratio is telling you that the demand for gold in the world is much greater, relative to demand for silver, and honestly come outside of the calls i get from the u.s., i very rarely get a call from asia or europe about silver. they only care about gold, the u.s. is where silver demand really comes from. alix: scarlet, you should not of chosen mark bartlett's charge. it doesn't tell you anything. tellet: he said it doesn't you where the pr

and to bring in ken hoffman there is a lot of confusion over whether iron ore is extremely liquid or s it? ken: iron ore is unbelievably liquid in china. what we really learn this week that i do not think people are talking about is that iron ore is really a chinese traded commodity. we are seeing more and more that china is the world's biggest buyer of commodities, but they are becoming the world biggest traitor of commodities. the important thing to note here is that chinese markets are far more volatile than that of western markets. for example, the shanghai some numbers,ran that is 2.5 times more volatile. iron ore tends to the 3-4 times more volatile. this is not over. you will see massive swings in metal prices going forward. scarlet: thank you for the warning. having said that, give us a sense of the positioning here. how credit is a short iron ore trading position here? na, theyterms of tryinchi trade billions of dollars a day. they were incredibly short iron orchid monday was a short squeeze of all short squeezes. i think what a lot of traders do did is let a couple days pass

joining us now as ken hoffman, head of global metals and mining research.have you with us. i don't think i have ever seen a 19% gain in the day. maybe something like wheat, but what happened? >> with the shortcoming of the century. what was interesting is you didn't see the chinese government move as mildly as you thought -- thinkper and iron ore, i what happened was everyone is talking about the tsunami. every single mine coming up. a lot of the mills in china were running low inventory. what happened was the chinese government came out, trading negative, and people thought they would cut the gdp number and there would be a lot of negativity. what happened is they didn't say much of anything; the mill comes back, there's long short iron ore. 100 million metric tons will trade a day. tracy: you were saying that mom and pop investors are trading iron ore contracts? >> should my mom get entire into iron ore? daily in. and out. scarlet: this goes back to your thesis on how there is this great ball of money that rolls through china. it went to stocks, to proper

hoffman. very good morning to you. edmund is still in the studio. ken, to you.trast the fortunes of copper and gold this morning. that tell us anything insightful? in my lifehave never seen a quarter like this in almost 30 years. you saw daily moves in stocks at 5% become commonplace. the market is very confused about what is going on in china. now gold has been the big star. t in the a lot of tumul world, the fed going from four to maybe two times. some people think they will not raise it all. back-and-forth on goal. china. it all depends on the world came into 2016 to shorting all of the metals. it is the end of the world. and then all of a sudden, you saw a little bit of buying out of china. everything took off. it has been a really, really crazy year. of those quarters where when you look at the overall changes, they hide all kind of stories that happened within that period of three months. i have a gold price chart here that shows you year to date. this is just after the year, all feeling nervous, stock markets reflecting that. many asset lasses reflected t