Silver’s unsung strength

Silver sentiment has sure felt pretty apathetic to bearish recently, with traders wanting little to do with it. That’s understandable after silver was more than cut in half earlier this year. Yet despite that perception, silver is showing much unsung strength. It weathered a dangerous post-parabola collapse relatively well, and remains quite high compared to its own history and its primary driver gold. Such resiliency is bullish.

In late January, silver skyrocketed with gold to an all-time high near $116 per ounce. That climaxed a spectacular bull run with 455.2% gains over 27.8 months! Overall that really outperformed gold’s parallel monster record cyclical bull, amplifying its gains by 2.3x. But silver’s performance sure wasn’t uniform, lagging gold early on before shooting parabolic near the end to catch up. That terminal moonshot was wild.

In just 3.1 months into late January’s peak, silver catapulted an incredible 149.0% higher! As I warned in mid-January about a week before silver’s climax, that was a dangerous extreme parabola. Decades of studying market history has led me to define those as doublings within two-to-three months following massive bull runs. And such one-sided popular-speculative-mania greed-fueled moves always end badly.

I used the infamous example from January 1980 in that essay. Way back then silver skyrocketed a truly-astounding 196.1% in just 2.0 months into that insane peak! Those levels wouldn’t be seen again until a staggering 31.3 years later in April 2011! By March 1980 just 2.2 months after that climax, silver crashed a soul-crushing 76.9%! So I concluded that mid-January-2026 essay on silver’s parabola with sober warnings.

“Vertical moonshots are super-risky, nothing to be trifled with. … Traders should avoid chasing silver’s popular-speculative-mania gains, and gird for an imminent big-and-fast selloff.” A bit over a week later, silver would stretch an eye-popping 144.3% above its key 200-day-moving-average baseline! That proved a terrifying 46.0-year high in overboughtness, silver’s most extreme witnessed since January 1980!

So after such a hyper-risky parabolic moonshot, silver was absolutely due for a symmetrical collapse like after similar past blowoffs. Indeed it arrived swiftly with brutal violence. Right out of late January’s peak, silver crashed a gut-wrenching 27.5% in a single trading day! That was its second-worst daily crash ever extending all the way back to 1971! I wrote another essay in mid-February analyzing its dire implications.

The aftermath of January 2026’s wildest extremes in nearly a half-century sure could’ve been way worse. Silver could’ve again collapsed 75%+ in its necessary

post-parabola reckoning. For reference a 3/4ths loss would’ve sledgehammered silver all the way back near $29! Yet at worst in mid-July, silver ‘merely’ fell 52.3% over 5.6 months bottoming above $55. Considering that situation, silver actually proved fairly resilient.

While getting cut in half is a serious, massive selloff absolutely, that’s up near best-case-scenario territory following an extreme parabola. At mid-July’s post-parabola low, silver was down 21.9% year-to-date which certainly contributed to recent bearish herd sentiment. Yet that perspective is myopic, distorted by the post-parabola reckoning. Very impressively at that recent low, silver was actually still up 46.7% year-over-year!

Despite all the savage carnage in silver in the half-year into mid-July, it has still averaged nearly $74 so far in 2026. That’s a phenomenal 116.7% higher than 2025’s comparable YTD period into early September! So it’s surprising if not perplexing to hear traders and analysts increasing bagging on silver recently. Are their perspectives so narrow-minded they don’t see silver weathering a post-parabola bust with flying colors?

Several weeks ago I was interviewed on a podcast, and after a long discussion on gold the host asked me why silver is performing so poorly. Despite seeing the bearish sentiment, I was kind of taken aback by that question. I responded saying I thought silver was faring really well this year, showing impressive resilience relative to gold. That shocked the host, who moved on because clearly I knew nothing about silver!

Maintaining perspective is everything in the markets, because we humans all have the natural tendency to extrapolate the latest moves we’ve seen out into infinity. Psychologists have studied this in great depth giving it different names including recency bias, availability heuristic, and hyperbolic discounting. It is a huge problem for traders, as overweighting the present emotionally greatly impairs buying low and selling high.

Letting a few days, weeks, or even months of the latest price action fully inform your trading outlook is insufficient. The minimum-necessary perspective is to consider all recent moves within the past half-year of context. But not long after silver’s extreme parabolic-spike anomaly, it’s necessary to extend that essential framing perspective well beyond that to the last few years or so. This hybrid silver chart suffices.

It includes standard silver technicals, but overlaid on the silver/gold ratio. Gold is silver’s dominant primary driver, with gold’s recent price action overwhelmingly fueling prevailing silver sentiment and thus trading. But rather than use the actual SGR in this chart which is a hard-to-parse decimal like the 0.015x midweek, the identical gold/silver ratio with an inverted axis is much easier to understand running 67.3x Wednesday.

Had silver just cratered by half in six months after a normal bull run, it would be catastrophic. But after shooting parabolic rocketing up 149.0% in just 3.1 months to its most-overbought levels since January 1980, getting cut in half is quite resilient. Post-parabola losses out of nearly-half-century extremes could have again cratered 3/4ths+! Silver’s unsung strength in recent months is really underappreciated by traders.

In July surrounding that post-parabola bottoming, silver averaged a bit over $58. That was still 55.0% above the comparable July-2025 average! Had you told traders anytime last year silver would be up at recent levels, they would’ve beenecstatic. Silver’s performance this year only feels weak if myopically considered just from late January’s parabolic climax. Yet its crazy extremes never had any chance to be sustainable.

Even during that inevitable and necessary post-parabola collapse since, silver has carved a massive bullish falling-wedge chart pattern just like gold’s parallel one. Those tend to resolve in strong upside breakouts, which indeed happened in gold, its miners’ stocks, and silver. Silver’s decisive breakout portends much-bigger gains likely in coming months. So did the depth of its post-parabola bottoming in mid-July.

Again a bit over $55, silver had plunged to just 79.7% of that baseline 200dma. That proved a 3.9-year low, the most oversold silver had been since September 2022 over a year before its late monster bull got underway! Silver’s huge 52.5% selloff over 5.6 months had eradicated all the hyperbolic herd greed into that parabolic climax, resetting the technical and sentimental stages paving the way for another big bull run.

Yet silver’s unsung strength in recent months is most apparent in the silver/gold ratio, which isn’t widely followed. You want to talk about weak silver? From January 2020 to September 2023 just before silver’s late bull got underway, the SGR averaged just 81.7x. In other words, it took 81.7 ounces of silver to equal the value of one ounce of gold. That was very poor historically, with longer-term averages around 55x to 60x.

From October 2023 to October 2025 during silver’s late bull before its final three parabolic months into late January 2026, the SGR was even worse averaging 87.3x! As the SGR line on this chart shows, silver seriously lagged gold’s monster record bull for the great majority of its duration. Back then silver was performing so dismally that I rarely bothered writing about it. Silver remained the precious-metals pariah.

The three months into silver’s parabolic peak and symmetrical three months after was again an extreme anomaly, like nothing witnessed in nearly a half-century. So SGR reads in that weren’t representative of anything sustainable, but for reference they averaged 66.5x on the way up then 62.0x on the way down. But it is what came since that reveals silver’s unsung strength, starting in May after that anomaly reversed.

Over these latest four-plus months as silver sentiment languished in the bearish gutter and its price got sliced in half, the SGR still averaged 65.4x! With the brief exception of that unsustainable parabola, silver hasn’t been this strong relative to gold since mid-2014. Despite its necessary and healthy post-parabola collapse, silver is still doing its best versus gold in a dozen years! Myopic bearishness on silver is misplaced.

Scrap metal is a major source of feedstock for the EU's ailing smelters.