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For those investors who have the balls to go against crowdthink when a lot of money is being made – a type of person you don’t find often in finance media, unfortunately – it’s obvious that the fundamental rationality of the way silver prices have behaved in early CY26 is, at best, pretty murky.
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At worst, it’s clearly a hyped-up bandwagon indistinguishable from meme stock trades. Or even cryptocurrency, whenever the market broadly turns its attention back to that class of assets, which seems to happen quarterly.
Get this: The world’s most popular major silver ETF right now, the U.S.-based iShares Silver Trust, has seen some ~US$35 billion worth of trades (on a “notional basis,” according to BTIG analyst Jonathan Krinsky).
That’s obviously a big number, but it’s also around the same amount of Monday turnover that the SPDR S&P 500 ‘SPY’ ETF saw; a Wall Street index fund.
At the same time, new research out this week from VandaTrack has declared trade momentum in silver has currently multiplied by some 11x. That means the silver trade is currently hotter than NVIDIA.
Earlier this month, “small-time amateur investors” crowded into silver commodity trades, too – not just ETFs – with 30-day retail inflows hitting nearly US$1B over the month through the Christmas and New Year’s holiday period.
By now, you can probably see where I am going with this.
No, I’m not shorting silver, or “downramping.” You may like to think that, but the world rarely makes that much sense. Before you get your hackles up, please note I’m not anti-money. If you’re printing cash on silver-minded investments right now: Good for you, you’ve demonstrated your market intelligence, you are, in my eyes, reader, a savvy operator. That isn’t up for debate.
What is up for debate, in my mind at least, and I would think the mind of anybody reasonably sane, is how much further silver has to run.
As at just before midday on Wednesday, Week 5, silver futures are currently ~+56% higher than they were thirty days ago. Silver is right now outperforming gold, and it’s outperforming copper, and it’s outperforming lithium, even with the latter caught up in the glow of its battery-metal-bounceback.
There are, obviously, real reasons why silver is in demand. It’s needed in solar panels and circuit boards, it’s needed in the AI sector (of course it is), and it’s also needed in automaking. (At the same time everybody is trying to get it, big and small alike.)
And at the same time as that, in a world where nobody is too sure where the global economy’s heading or what the USD will do, central banks and investors at home are snatching up gold as a haven asset – and because of how far ahead gold has surged in the last two years, there’s a valid case to make that silver now justifiably deserves a re-rate.
In that world, the price of silver may well easily find a new permanent floor above US$100/oz, and if I had to guess, I’d say it’s got further to run.
But it would be a very bold person who was willing to say the risk of a correction event isn’t on the table – especially because it’s far surpassing the rate at which gold is climbing, and if silver is hotter than NVIDIA right now, well, that’s pretty big.
A reasonable investor would have stop losses in place, which is my overall point. But until the music stops, the party’s likely to continue.
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