This post began as a conversation with a data request to the commentariat over at Calculated Risk, and exists because of the generous assistance of Mike in Long Island - hats off to you, Mike!
It seemed to me that the daily volume of shares traded in the silver ETF SLV was quite high, but I did not have the time series data of the daily shares outstanding (a moving target with an ETF such as SLV).
So, from the start of 2010 through today, is the daily shares outstanding (right axis, in blue) and the percent of those shares outstanding that the daily trading volume represents (left axis, in red). For comparison the total arithmetic average is included along with a monthly moving average.
Readers may draw their own conclusions, but there appears to be two distinct periods with the higher volume period starting around the beginning of November, 2010. And recently, the daily traded volume has been quite high compared to the rest of the data in the time period covered.
