iShares Silver Trust Files To Become Even Larger

Today’s filing is an automatic shelf registration (S-3ASR) is for a whopping 75,000,000 shares. If all overages or overallotments are used it would be up to 87,150,000 new shares. There is an obvious situation here and that is that the trust is not doing a huge secondary offering.

The iShares website shows that the trust (as of yesterday) had some 332,300,000 shares outstanding with a total net asset value of a whopping $10.948 billion. The trust also listed some 322,021,629.8 ounces were held in the trust and the Net Asset Value per SLV in actual silver is 96.874%.

One consideration is not so important due to high trading volume, but the trust intends to issue shares on a continuous basis only in blocks of 50,000 or integral multiples thereof.

The iShares Silver Trust (NYSEMKT: SLV) trades today around $32.80 and the 52-week range is $25.34 to $36.44. At the prevailing price and assuming that all shares were suddenly created, this would imply that there would be another $2.46 billion in silver demand from this ETF alone.

As a reminder, the tax on long-term gains (longer than one-year) from the sale of silver are taxed at 28% under the “collectibles” classification rather than the 15% capital gains tax rate.

JON C. OGG