Andy Schechtman

Andy Schectman is president of Miles Franklin, a Minnesota-based precious metals investment firm, and a recurring commentator on the physical gold and silver market for outlets including Kitco News and the Investing News Network. His value to metals investors comes from what he tracks: real metal rather than price charts. He follows COMEX (the Commodity Exchange, the main US futures market) deliveries, vault withdrawals, and bullion — physical metal in bar or coin form — flows between London and New York.

Schectman has spent more than three decades in the bullion business at Miles Franklin, a firm founded in 1990 that sells and stores gold, silver, platinum, and palladium for private clients. In February 2025, he told Kitco News that exchange data showed more than 12.5 million ounces of gold and 40 million ounces of silver had moved from London vaults into the US COMEX system since November 2024 — a flow at a scale and in a direction the market rarely sees. He reads that movement as physical demand overwhelming paper markets, and he has made the same argument in a series of interviews with the Investing News Network.

His analytical method is macro and demand-side. Schectman argues that de-dollarization — countries reducing their reliance on the US dollar for trade and reserves — and monetary planning within BRICS (the Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa bloc, which has been expanding) are pushing gold back toward an official monetary role. On silver, he has said he sees "massive potential," driven by the same delivery-versus-paper dynamics he follows in gold. As he put it in an Investing News Network interview: "I think you're beginning to see that delivery is being prioritized over paper promises, and that's a big deal because it's never happened before."

For mining stock investors, Schectman supplies the demand-side backdrop that frames the top line for gold and silver producers: central bank accumulation, exchange inventory drawdowns, and the currency politics behind precious metal prices. The limits are worth stating plainly. Miles Franklin sells bullion, so his commentary consistently favors physical ownership, and he does not publish company-level equity research. Read him for the monetary and physical-market thesis, not for stock selection.