Coincidentally, late this morning I went to one of those traveling roadshows where they purchase precious metals, bringing along a childhood coin collection that I wanted to turn into cash.<p>I started with a single 1 ounce silver medallion and was given a quote for $80. When I had checked the silver price earlier this morning it was above $115.<p>I questioned the buyer about the spread and he said the spot price was down, and the smelters were backed up so that was their best offer.<p>I brought out some other silver coins, specifically liberty head and Morgan dollars. He looked at the app on his phone and said “hold on I gave you the wrong price,” and then said “I’ll give you $35 for each of them,” including the pure 1 oz silver medallion.<p>I said no thank you and left, miffed, thinking he was jerking me around.<p>I didn’t realize the price of silver was collapsing.
Chances are, he was indeed jerking you around. Nearly every one of these traveling road show style buyers pay very very very very little for coins. They have no reputation to uphold and are the literal definition of “fly by night” - and by the time you realize how little they paid you, they’re gone.<p>Source: Am full-time professional coin dealer (who is NOT fly by night!) and have to deal with the repercussions of people getting hosed by these roadshows all the time :(
He does have to turn a profit on what he's buying. You want spot price? Oddly enough, in California and maybe other states, a pawn shop will give you spot price.
There's a lot going on here and it's not just the price going up and then going down (see my other comments). Basically, the entirely silver market is dysfunctional at the moment. And it's all about bailing out banks who are getting wiped out by the silver rally.<p>So when you sell silver at a pawn shop or to a retail dealer, here's what happens in a normal market. You get an instant price, 5-10% off spot hopefully. That dealer then takes that silver and sells it to a refiner in higher volume with a lower margin (to spot). That's their profit. Refiners will convert that silver into bars and sell it to wholesalers and institutional buyers.<p>But instead what's happening is the refiner needs to hold onto the silver for 7-14 days before it gets smelted and processed. With high volatility, they're not paying out the dealers until it's processed and sold. That's a huge cash flow problem. Instead of instant money, it's money in 2 weeks and you have no idea how much money.<p>So the retail dealer has to wait and it could be 20% lower or 20% higher in the current market so instead of 5-10% they eitehr have to offer 30%+ less than spot price <i>if they buy it at all</i>. That money tied up has an opportunity cost.<p>Combine this with a shortage of physical silver to deliver on futures contracts and the refiners aren't really getting the silver they need to satisfy that demand.<p>So the spot price is fake. Nobody's buying anyway. Low wholesale supply means the prices continue to go up. Banks are haemorrhaging money because they have huge short positions. They have to borrow silver to meet their obligations and the silver lease rate (the price to borrow silver for a money has like 10x'ed) and this is where we are.
If the banks had massive short positions, why didn't they report huge losses in Q4?
The banks are not getting wiped out by the silver rally. JP Morgan has not been engaged in shorting the silver markets for years. This is a baseless conspiracy theory, and JPM has also been accused of shorting BTC as well.<p>The entire narrative is made up and this is really just supply vs demand in terms of silver contracts and shares. I have been actively trading silver since last year and made over $100k and in precious metals (mostly gold) for 30+ years since I first graduated from college so I'm not just an idle spectator.
Gold has merely mean-reverted, not "crashed". Some profit-taking since gold got a bit ahead of itself.<p>If gold continues growing at the same rate as the last 6 months, it will take gold all of a month and a half to get back to where it was.<p><a href="https://i.imgur.com/bRAy1FB.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/bRAy1FB.png</a><p>Now, gold might not continue growing, but D.C. hasn't fixed its problems that are causing gold to rise, so I do have a degree of confidence that it will recover quickly.
This is the "dump" part of pump and dump. TikTok influencers have been pushing the gold & silver rally for weeks now, and it was inevitable that people at the top would eventually cash out.
Most of the influencers aren't even in on the investment, they just get paid to pump, and a lot of them don't even get paid, they just do it for the eye balls.<p>People want to get rich quick.<p>There's going to be a never ending list of people that will tell them how - just so they can get useless karma points on Social Media, even if they don't make any money, and just convince you to lose your money.
> <i>TikTok influencers</i><p>The dump is proximately caused by Trump picking a normal Fed chairman. Nobody on TikTok has anything to do with that, they're just pumping everything because seeling out is their day job.
It's not just Tiktok, and not just the last few weeks. There have been pro-Gold ads in every form of media for the last couple of years, many focusing on uncertainty. The timing is pretty clear.<p>The 2024 election was a time of great uncertainty, and Trump's first year in power delivered a reality worse than the fears. Trump is still throwing random tariff threats (and actual tariffs) around without rhyme or reason, but he's discovered that threatening to invade (allied) countries can stir things up even more effectively. Choosing a lackey to replace a competent federal reserve chair isn't going to help matters. We're just one quarter of the way through Trump's presidency (assuming he lives and doesn't seek another term), and it seems like the uncertainty is just going to get worse.<p>However, that uncertainty is, by no means, certain. Domestic resistance and midterm elections could curb Trump's power. International resistance is starting to coalesce. e.g. The EU's threat to use their "trade bazooka" probably contributed to Trump's TACO on Greenland, as did the potential demise of NATO. Responses to Trump's international graspings will likely become more prompt and more muscular, reducing the instability Trump can cause. The system has been shocked, but now its adapting. Many nations are hedging against U.S. centred uncertainty by pivoting to China or other allies. Global markets will likely become more stable as nations learn how to work around Trump's chaos by working around the U.S.. Still, it's very possible that Trump will find new and "creative" ways to make everybody freak out again.<p>Bottom line, the uncertainty that's been driving gold prices up since 2024 is going to let up at some point. But when? How overvalued will gold be when it does let up?
Fortunately they would have to repeal the 22nd Amendment to allow that dingdong a third term<p>No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this Article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.
Too early to tell. They're both up since 6 months ago. Could be another one of those flash crash events. Buckle up!
This is a prime example of being confidently wrong. As another commenter put it (paraphrased) if you think a few Tiktokers can <i>move the global silver market</i> then you're a deeply unserious person.<p>There are fundamental issues driving up silver prices in the last 6+ months, capped off by China instituting strict export controls starting January 1, 2026, which has further tightened supply.<p>This is a short squeeze, just like Gamestop from a few years back. Banks hold huge short positions, the prices keep going up, the exchanges are intentionally trying to bail out by the banks by crashing the market and no retailer is actually buying silver for a bunch of reasons I went into more detail about in other comments on this thread.
Gold reverted to the price it was <i>wait for it</i> five days ago. What actually happened was that Trump was forced/pressured to pick Warsh because prices were spiking in anticipation of how Trump's preferred pick would impact global finance.<p>But anyone who thinks Trump won't get his way and control the Fed to create hyper-inflation is living in a fantasy world that I wish were our actual reality.<p>We live in a world where Trump launched a criminal investigation against Powell. This is not someone who somehow learned his lesson in the last five days.<p>The irony is that if Trump understood how markets perceive threats to Fed independence, he'd try to influence rates behind closed doors and not make a public spectacle of his attempt to undermine Fed independence!
Fed independence is damaged but it was never as independent as it should have been.<p>No one since Volcker has been a real hawk. It hasn't led to hyperinflation, just a continual debasement that has served many purposes.
"Fed independence" has always been kind of a ruse. The theory is Congress would want to print money so they can spend it, so you need someone whose job it is to not do that. But then Congress just borrows the money instead, which forces the Fed to respond to keep interest rates where they want them, with the result that they still end up de facto printing trillions of dollars at the behest of Congress.<p>To some extent the "independence" is even worse, because the Fed has limited ways it can respond to what Congress does and "long-term cause individual debt to get completely out of hand" is one of their primary effects, which is pretty bad and plausibly worse than inflation having been slightly higher over the same period.
I have no idea about his credentials or suitability for the job, but Warsh is the son in law of Trump's buddy Ronald Lauder. I get the feeling he's not picking people he doesn't think he can control.
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This was an inevitable correction. Gold and silver had gone parabolic for the past month. Nothing goes straight up. This takes the gold price all the way back to where it was last week.<p>Honestly, I don't think Warsh's appointment had much to do with it.
Doesn't this reset the silver price to where it was at the start of the month? This is hardly news, people got a bit over-excited in January. The spike is more newsworthy than the fall, and neither are all that interesting.
Silver was around 1/3 of the current price a year ago. Calling this a crash is a bit much. If it hits $20 then it's a crash.<p>Side note and completely unrelated, but I got my kid a 10 oz .50 caliber silver bullet last year and kicked myself for spending that much on a gag gift (like $300). . . . Should have bought a box of them.
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Washington state, as part of their frenzy of tax increases, decided that gold and silver bullion will be subject to the sales tax. Poof! There goes any point in investing in gold and silver. (Collector coins, too.)
Oregon just south of you has no sales tax
The way you've written it sounds like taxing unmonetized bullion is insane overreach, but is it? They're just treating them the same as any other commodities. I can understand if you're opposed to sales taxes generally, but the only reason to single out bullion for an exception I can see is historic norms.<p>They're also applying a tax to monetized bullion. That's more more like taxing currency exchanges and it's a bit weird since currency exchanges are normally taxed on appreciation.
We do not charge sales tax when you exchange Dollars for Euros. Bullion advocates argue that exchanging dollars for physical gold is a currency exchange rather than a consumption purchase.<p>If you were to turn that bullion into an actual product like jewelry, then it would be taxed.<p>When a firm with tank capacity takes delivery of an oil contract they secured via the CBRE, do they pay sales tax on that? No, because it’s intended for resale.<p>Unmonetized gold bullion is similarly generally intended for resale. Generally no one is “consuming” gold bullion.
Currency exchanges are exactly why I differentiated between monetized and unmonetized bullion. I don't see why going to Costco and buying a bar of gold is fundamentally different than buying the same weight of gold jewelry. That jewelry may very well be intended for resale the same way.
Whereas to me, it's wild that thousands of years of gold bullion trade as a form of currency exchange is supplanted basically overnight and now only "gold but only on paper" would be considered the only form of real gold currency.<p>"Monetized" gold has only existed for 50 years since gold futures started being offered in 1972. But the real "retail era" of "gold but only on paper" started just ~20 years ago with gold ETF's in 2003 (Australia) and 2004 (USA). So in just 20 years, we're now arguing that the norm from the past 3,000 years of gold trade is completely invalidated.<p>That said, you're not completely out of line with the views of the USA federal government. Gold has fascinating history of regulation. There was the 1933 total ban on private ownership when U.S. citizens were given until May 1, 1933, to surrender all gold coins and bullion. That lasted until 1974. Or that gold bullion is not subject to FinCEN Form 105 (currency) but rather CBP Form 6059B (goods).
Much of the 3,000 years of history you're referring to saw precious metals used as wealth storage primarily in the form of objects like jewelry, silverware, and candlesticks. All of which have sales taxes.<p>The question I'm asking is why it's unreasonable that bullion that we've agreed isn't currency isn't being treated differently than these other things?
A fork is a finished consumer product. Even if it's made of silver, you can use it to eat with.<p>Bullion isn't a finished consumer product, it's the packaging format for the raw material.<p>Sales tax applies to finished consumer products. The intermediary stages are traditionally exempt, i.e. the person who buys bullion in order to make silver forks doesn't pay sales tax, the person who buys the fork does.
> Whereas to me, it's wild that thousands of years of gold bullion trade as a form of currency exchange is supplanted basically overnight and now only "gold but only on paper" would be considered the only form of real gold currency.<p>I mean, it's not a coincidence. For example, the US government has laws against using gold as currency, and they take those laws seriously and enforce them with vigor. They don't want dollars to suffer the competition.<p>Given the laws, it is necessarily the case, by definition, that gold is not currency.
> the US government has laws against using gold as currency<p>I don't think that's true, or I can't find any evidence of it. If you want to buy a car and the seller agrees to accept 50 gold coins instead of $100,000 cash, that is perfectly legal. Hell, the US makes currency out of pure gold that are currency at face values of $5-50 (but the gold in the coins is worth 100x more than the face value).<p>Are you talking about the Gold Reserve Act of 1934 and Executive Order 6102? That banned private ownership of gold and demanded that citizens turn in their gold. But it was lifted in 1974.
> <i>the US government has laws against using gold as currency, and they take those laws seriously and enforce them with vigor</i><p>This is nonsense. If you'd like, you can absolutely sell your house for gold bullion. (Or Japanese yen or bails of peanuts.)
> That jewelry may very well be intended for resale the same way.<p>It isn't.<p>There is a widespread belief that jewelry is a durable investment, that if you fall on hard times you will be able to sell the jewelry for an amount similar to what you paid for it, or more.<p>It's fair to say that many people have this idea in mind when they buy jewelry, and that it pushes up the price.<p>But it isn't true; if you resell your jewelry you're going to get basically nothing compared to what you paid, unless you like to wear gold chains. The resale value of new jewelry is more like the resale value of a new car.<p>If there was any significant demand to resell jewelry, <i>everyone would know this</i>. The fact that they don't is sufficient to demonstrate that they have no intention of actually reselling.
You can sell jewelry for the same price as the equivalent weight in whatever purity of precious metals it is and I specified same weight in the parent comment. They won't be the same price originally, but that's not particularly germane to this discussion of whether there should be a sales tax on one vs the other.<p>And for what it's worth, people buy things for different reasons. It's very common for Indians to explicitly value jewelry as a wealth store (among other reasons), to give one example.
> Bullion advocates argue that exchanging dollars for physical gold is a currency exchange rather than a consumption purchase.<p>One can argue that until they're blue, but it'd still be wrong. Gold is a commodity, and if you're buying it shell-packed at Costco you probably should be paying sales tax on it.
"Generally no one is “consuming” gold bullion."<p>Huh? Gold bullion is an input to hundreds of industrial processes. If it weren't, why would gold have any value?
Why would gold, something that’s had value for thousands of years prior to the Industrial Revolution, have any value?
Even in ancient times it was consumed to make jewelry and decorations. People used to go to the goldsmiths to sell their gold.
Wouldn’t that be for the same kinds of reasons things like purple dyes were valuable: rare to find, hard to harvest, hard to transmogrify (insect/sea life guts into clothing dye, gold into chains or other wearables), hard to break, which all culminates into a quick visual indication of wealth.<p>Now? Gold is a great conductor of electricity (of course silver is better) and some people still like wearing lots of flashy jewelry.<p>I have no earthly clue why people find it valuable to invest in other than it’s like bitcoin: it’s valuable because everyone else also thinks it’s valuable.<p>Never once have I read a quarterly progress report from the CEO of the element “gold” outlining profit strategies for the next year.
That's not consumption <i>as it applies to sales tax rules</i>. In almost every jurisdiction, raw materials and inventory purchased for resale or industrial processing are exempt from sales tax.
Washington State will do anything to avoid just having an income tax.
Buy and keep it elsewhere? Buy futures?
In English-speaking countries, we have a system that prints money and gives it to asset owners. Gold is still an asset, so buying it will still let people participate in that system. Increasing taxes by whatever (I'll assume 10%) is material but it doesn't remove any point, just makes it a bit less attractive. It could easily be a less risky play than investing in US bonds given that they can't pay them back in real terms.
Taxing bullion is absurd - it’s not a product but more like currency or a placeholder of money you already have. What other taxes are they passing when you say “frenzy”?
Why is it more like a currency than any other object? It's not negotiable currency or legal tender.<p>People buy it and sell it. I don't see any difference between bullion, iron ore, frozen concentrated orange juice, and Pokemon cards. You buy a thing, you pay the sales tax.
Well it's more like a currency than any other object because it has been used historically to either a) be the currency, or b) back the currency. Sure that's not true today in the United States, but like, it's obviously different than frozen concentrated orange juice... can we not at least agree on that pretty tame assumption? Or is this just some semantics race to non-meaning?<p>Iron ore is similar physically, but it's really just a raw input material/ingredient used for heavy industrial manufacturing and production, it's never been intended to be an appreciating asset/hedge against inflation.<p>I'm unfamiliar with whatever tax is being referred to in this specific comment thread, but I'd be curious how something like $SIVR is handled, considering it's backed by actual silver in vaults. That could lead to some unintended consequences if the investment plans of a lot of money suddenly changes how it's being allocated.
> Iron ore is similar physically, but it's really just a raw input material/ingredient used for heavy industrial manufacturing and production, it's never been intended to be an appreciating asset/hedge against inflation, not any intrinsic property of gold itself.<p>Gold is not <i>intended</i> to be an asset/hedge against inflation either. Market participants <i>believe</i> that gold has value and that it can hedge against inflation. The belief is what gives life to gold being as a hedge against inflation.<p>Gold is not an asset, it’s a commodity, an industrial input, and material for jewelry, and for some reason I fail to understand, people buy and hold it because they believe it is an asset that will appreciate in value, but it’s just an elementary metal that is useful for being easy to work with (jewelry) and because it doesn’t oxidize. It does not generate income, you can’t eat it, and in a post-apocalyptic scenario, it’s useless. I suppose the density of gold would allow some very small, very high mass slingshot balls you could defend yourself against people with?
A system is what it does, and gold is popular for jewelry because it’s a useful way to wear money.<p>Off topic and this might be apocryphal, but I heard on the internet a good reason to keep “money” in the form of gold chains and other jewelry, is that it counts as personal property, so if you’re arrested during a drug bust or trafficking women, your cash and bank accounts may be seized, but whatever you wear to prison gets put in a ziplock bag and returned to you when you leave :)
Gold hasn't been money since 1971.
<a href="https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary/?BillNumber=1386&Year=2025&Initiative=false" rel="nofollow">https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary/?BillNumber=1386&Year=202...</a>
Is taxing investment absurd?
This investment is now taxed more than other types of investment. Is sales tax charged when you buy stock? Should it be?
"Tax what you want less of."<p>Do you want less investment?
Why would you want to encourage investment in gold?
Gold is not an investment. It takes otherwise productive capital out of the economy and produces nothing. It's functionally no different than stuffing your money in a mattress.
It has utility though: unlike the dollars in your mattress, it can't be printed into oblivion by your central bank. It is relatively portable, and people have flocked to it as a store of value especially during periods of socioeconomic instability when assets are going down and gov't spending is going up. It's tradeable for fiat in any country, so it allows you to bring value along if you relocate.<p>Its price reflects that utility and like any modern asset, a lot of speculation. You can speculate on whether it's more or less useful given current events -- nothing wrong with speculating that it is only going to be increasingly useful.
What is it that you're arguing for then? That there be some entity that gets to decide what is and isn't a productive use of all of our excess money? Who gets to decide what's excess? Who gets to decide what is and isn't a productive use of the money?<p>How is this any different than buying a house? Buying a house that's already been built is pretty damn close to the same thing as buying gold. No new "work" is being done into the economy, you're just exchanging dollars for an asset that will likely appreciate a bit faster than inflation but less than $SPY.<p>The person you bought it from can do something else with that money, sure, but that's also true of the other person in your transaction to buy gold.<p>Maybe you'll say a house has more utility than bars of gold, but all of this at the end of the day, seems to come down to <i>your</i> specific views and judgements of what it means for capital to be used productively. So to circle back to the beginning, what is it you're advocating for here? That because <i>you</i> don't see gold as a low risk hedge against inflation as being "productive" it should face more taxes to incentivize it not happening?
> <i>Buying a house that's already been built is pretty damn close to the same thing as buying gold. No new "work" is being done into the economy, you're just exchanging dollars for an asset that will likely appreciate a bit faster than inflation but less than $SPY.</i><p>I mostly agree with you, but I don't think the house comparison is good. Houses require lots of maintenance, and to hold their value (comparable to other houses) they often need remodeling every decade or so. If instead of houses we just said "land" then I think the comparison would hold up more.
No, im not arguing that it should be illegal. Im just saying, as Warren Buffet before me did, that its not an investment.<p>It relies on the greater fool theory to produce excess returns. It is bad for the economy when money idles in non productive speculative assets.
You either maintain the house for others use and extract rent or live in it. This is productive.<p>If you are hoarding an unused house we should heavily tax that to make it unreasonable to do so.
In physical metals that don’t generate income or induce further economic activity, I don’t believe so. What good does a hunk of gold sitting in a safe do for the economy?
Wealth tax is the best type of tax, because it incentivizes productive activities against speculation. It should be levied on a continuous basis rather than on transaction basis though, which is just basic numerical analysis.
That's a win for society if the money is instead invested into something productive!
But it's a loss if it's forced into risky investments that aren't productive.
I never invested in gold because it is not productive. I don't have any money, either (other than pocket money), because I've invested all of it.<p>Gold is usually invested in as a hedge against inflation. It's not really the gold that goes up and down in value, it's the dollar that goes down and up.
This is an oversimplification IMO. There are higher order effects on the price of gold that makes it not directly related to the value of the dollar.<p>I'm pointing this out because I have seen a lot of sentiment recently about how the dollar is crashing, just look at the price of gold. Yes, the dollar is decreasing in value faster than usual, but it also isn't crashing in the way that gold is spiking.<p>This sentiment I think drives speculative gold demand, from standard speculative investing FOMO as well as from emotionally driven inflation fear well beyond what is realistic. The same thing happens to the stock market.
You can call it emotionally driven, but if it’s taken as a fact that the dollar is and will continue to lose value ( and the president is incentivized to pump the price of Bitcoin, whatever level of hell/episode of Mr Robot that is) - then you should expect gold to go up infinitely, relative to a worthless dollar. People aren’t necessarily trading out of fear, just trying to predict the future.
Wouldn’t gold be spiking in proportion to the market’s predicted future value of the dollar, rather than its current value? If the market’s paying attention you’d expect its gold valuation to lead the actual inflation numbers.
Given that the gold and the dollar are not productive I think one is betting that society is less productive than inflation when one invests in gold and that one will need to pay a ransom over a long weekend when one holds dollars.
People choose to hold non-yield-bearing assets when they believe the returns offered by current investment opportunities are not sufficient to justify the risks.<p>It is the miracle of modern capital markets that enables almost anyone to quickly and easily invest their savings in productive assets, but of course capital markets aren’t perfect. The availability of “none of the above” options (like gold) that remove savings from the pool of active investment capital is the essential feedback loop that balances risk and return.
>Poof! There goes any point in investing in gold and silver.<p>This is not how taxes work at all, my guy. There is a thing called tax elasticity, which is a measure of the proportional change in buying/selling to change in taxation. If you want to have a good-faith discussion about taxes, at least acknowledge that these measures exist instead of pretending that <i>any</i> degree of taxation makes economic activity go "Poof!". It's intellectually dishonest and is not useful conversation.
Crypto markets won in the sense that every single asset class can somehow trade like a memecoin now.
Fun Fact about the Great Depression - RCA is the Poster-child of exuberance and Tesla has had a higher PE for >2 years.<p>Meme stocks might coincide with meme coins - but I don't know if it's fair to blame crypto for everything.<p>I think the reality is that - for whatever reason - people are willing to take on <i>MUCH</i> greater risk today for reward than they were prior to the pandemic.<p>I don't think we can blame crypto for everything. Sure, maybe you could say crypto has been meme-ing since 2017 - 3 years before the pandemic. But we've seen plenty of speculative bubbles like that - if it even was one.<p>Crypto didn't really start meme-ing with clearly bullshit NFTs and meme coins until the exact same time - 2021 - when Dogecoin et al have meteoric rises coinciding almost exactly with all the meme stocks.<p>I think this is actually one the best meme indicators: <a href="https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dogecoin/doge/btc/" rel="nofollow">https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dogecoin/doge/btc/</a><p>The Japanese Asset bubble was by far the biggest bubble of all time - and it lasted nearly 6 years. The Nifty 50 was a 7 year bubble, nowhere near this big. So, we might be in a bubble - but if we are - it's getting close to being the biggest, longest one ever.
The hype around physical silver has been astounding in 2025 and so far in 2026.<p>I have nothing to back this up, but I believe a group of investors learned from cryptobros just how easy it is to pump and dump with social media and scare tactics, and here we are. Somebody please correct me.
I might be cynic and consider that other side in media have no marketable skills and other side is there just to get their name out so they can find a few suckers to give them money manage. Or they have something to sell like courses and seminars. Or it is free publicity for them. Pandering to various fields is likely profitable, be it cryptobros, goldbugs, silverstackers, hard money advocates, doomsday preppers, permabears or those believing in astrology I mean technical analysis...
This sounds awful, silver down 30%, gold down 11%, but it just brings them back to the 50 day moving average. It doesn't even break the bull trend.<p>Next week we'll find out if this was a buy on dip opportunity or if it marks a multi-year top in precious metals and the start of a deeper correction and real technical damage.<p>One day that will happen and the trend will reverse, but it's always more probable that a trend continues.
Silver has plenty of industrial uses. Very little has changed in industry to cause demand or supply shifts to match the massive price swings. Thus a lot of this is probably meme investors gambling
Fun fact about silver, besides its heavy industrial footprint, which you mentioned: the supply is dominated by Mexico. There have been some, uh, erratic words about Mexico from the people in the position to affect trade policy and foreign policy.
China decided to subject silver to export controls similar to rare earth metals. That's one of the big reasons for the silver growth.
We knew the correction was coming, but I don't think anyone expected the 30% move in one day.
Probably the opposite. Corrections happen quickly and all at once, somewhat similar to growth.<p>It would be more surprising if the 30% drop was spread out over a month.
Correct, momentum acceleration is generally a mean reversion signal in futures, and can be effectively combined with momentum signals i.e. you go long when it goes up but when it starts going up a lot you reduce your position.<p>And these signals are usually very compressed in time because acceleration is actually just an acceleration in the number of decisions being taken, which tends to blow off quite spectacularly.<p>Something that has changed is the large retail participation, which is making the scale of these moves quite crazy. Will be interesting to see what happens next, as with crypto the scale of the wipe seems so large that it is hard to see how that participation continues.<p>Healthy for markets but I am guessing this will conflict heavily with the politics.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.
George Gammon did, 24 hours beforehand<p>I cashed out :)<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3k9UqNA2l_4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3k9UqNA2l_4</a>
As someone who has been actively trading silver for the past year, the real reason that silver plummeted is because:<p>1) the market was looking for an excuse and the new Fed chain nominee was as good a reason as anything.<p>2) The margin requirements on metal futures changed THIS MONTH. Instead of having daily limits, they changed the margin requirements for futures contracts in real-time throughout this move. Futures brokerages calculate margin requirements every second, so what happened was as silver dropped today, the margin requirements got more strict and then people were being liquidated out of their positions immediately. This caused the markets to crash the way we did all day.<p>Previously, what you would see are circuit breakers kick in and the contracts would stop trading for a certain amount of time. You never used to see down 30% days ever, because circuit breakers would limit is. You would see limit down days, and the contracts would stop trading for the rest of the day and then reopen the next day. In the 70s and 80s I think there was a time when some contracts would open at limit down for 15+ days in a row and wouldn't trade for the entire day and people were financially ruined because they couldn't get out of a position for weeks on end.<p>So finding an excuse to sell on top of forced liquidation is what you saw today. It's a classic volcano top and I think silver is going to drift lower for the rest of the year.
Is there any good explanation for what is happening with gold prices long-term? If you look at 5-10 year charts it was pretty stable and started to look like NVIDIA stocks since 2023.
<a href="https://robinjbrooks.substack.com/p/everything-you-need-to-know-about" rel="nofollow">https://robinjbrooks.substack.com/p/everything-you-need-to-k...</a>
This article does a reasonable job of laying out some of the drivers:<p><a href="https://markets.financialcontent.com/stocks/article/marketminute-2026-1-30-the-great-precious-metals-reversal-gold-and-silver-plummet-as-parabolic-run-exhausts-retail-bullishness" rel="nofollow">https://markets.financialcontent.com/stocks/article/marketmi...</a>
Earlier today, it occurred to me that the "spot" price could go to zero if the physical metal isn't available for delivery. I missed the dip down into the 70s.
It still up an awful lot from the start of 2025. From about 30 up to 115 and down to 85.
Yep, I expect a bunch of people to buy at this price, hoping it's the bottom, but it still has plenty of room to fall.
$SLV is still up 125% in the past 6 months after this "collapse" which is absolutely bananas.
If memory serves, 1980 was the time of the silver corner by a couple of brothers.
The Hunt brothers. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday</a>
The Bunkers. My father told me the story many times as a child and he warned me sternly never to buy Silver. There's always more Silver he said. People will be dredging it out of old cupboards.
yeah but its up 125% in 6 months, so this doesn't hurt anyone except the crazies that saw the price already high a week ago and bought
*Paper silver. The gap widens
While not unexpected, the numbers still say that if you bought silver before Trump (which given history of metals countering uncertainty and the promised causes of uncertainty was a smart move), you're making a solid > doubling even now. For me, though, who gets too anxious when trying to attempt such things and ends up ruining it, it'll just go on the list of regrets like when I thought to but didn't invest in zoom once we started using it in 2020.
What goes up quickly comes down quickly?<p>At least we can afford nice things again
This isn't a simple correction. I've been following this for a couple of months and there's a lot going on. I suspect this isn't over. It's noteworthy that the year 1980 because that was when the Hunt brothers tried to corner the silver market. It's often used as an example of the market correcting itself. It's actually a better example of how the exchanges broke the Hunt brothers to bail out the banks.<p>The key event that caused the collapse is sometimes called Silver Thursday [1]. The exchange changed the liquidity rules, forcing a margin call the Hunt brothers couldn't make, forcing a selloff. This was arguably to bail out banks with large short positions in silver.<p>Well, pretty much the exact same thing happened this week when COMEX massively increased the margin requirements [2]. It's worth noting that the market is in a state called "backwardation" where the spot prices are higher than future prices. Refiners aren't buying silver, even at the inflated spot price, because of price risk. But also, the COMEX spot price is increasingly being viewed as "fake" because foreign exchanges are paying significantly more for physical silver thna the paper COMEX price [3].<p>Basically, this whole thing looks like another GameStop ie a short squeeze. There's not enouugh physical silver to meet contract demands. There's like 300oz of futures silver contracts per 1oz of physical silver.<p>If you followed the original GameStop short squeeze, the price tumbled there too but didn't solve the short squeeze. You even have exchanges closing people's options positions (eg RobinHood) despite them being in the money.<p>Banks still need to cover their significant short positions and it really looks like the exchanges are trying to crash the silver market to do it.<p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-28/cme-raises-silver-margins-as-prices-smash-records-in-wild-rally" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-28/cme-raise...</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://seekingalpha.com/article/4861917-why-silver-prices-in-us-china-have-diverged-so-sharply" rel="nofollow">https://seekingalpha.com/article/4861917-why-silver-prices-i...</a>
Do me a favor and look at how many CME Notices were issued raising margin requirements for precious metals in the past year. Hint: They do this all the time to account for market volatility and the contract value. If a contract increases by 10% margin is not static. CME raised margin requirements several times in the last month to little market effect.<p>Silver crashed because China halted trading on the only public silver and gold ETFs Friday. There are videos of HK police arresting guys freaking out because they couldn't cash out beforehand: Apparently the fund had been operating as some kind of pyramid scheme and was not solvent at those prices.<p>Also on Friday, China urged investors to "invest responsibly" or some such (source: FT) and froze a bunch of suspicious accounts. I believe those accounts were behind the pump and dump social media ("AI Asian Guy" videos on Youtube, investment subreddit spam) with the help of plenty of useful idiots.<p>There's a ton of good coverage of the precious metals run up in FT this past week.
So I found a chart showing silver prices vs margin requirements on Linkedin of all places [1]. Yes, margin requirements change and the exchange tries to protect the market in times of high volatility but increasing the margin requirements significantly means <i>everybody</i> has to put up more collateral even if you're significantly in the black.<p>That's my point: they're intentionally trying to crash the market. The analsysi that they're defending the banks from a short squeeze seems to fit the available data [2].<p>As for China, the government is ensuring their local industries have sufficient silver supply, which is particularly important for solar.<p>The US government has a lot of power to do similar to this but refuse to use it because it would hurt profits. I'm thinking specifically of the Defense Production Act, which could've been used to lower oil and gas prices in 2020-2022. Instead we passed on the costs to consumers, let oil companies export to the world and let them make record profits.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ryanlemand_this-chart-is-worth-studying-carefully-activity-7413806461371297792-8p7P/" rel="nofollow">https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ryanlemand_this-chart-is-wort...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/news/everything-investors-know-historic-silver-133000043.html" rel="nofollow">https://finance.yahoo.com/news/everything-investors-know-his...</a>
This is the answer; Diamond hands baby
so how long do you think will this play out? asking as a concerned silver and gold holder lol
I think that a real bubble requires margin. It's not just that people are buying because the price is going up, it's that people are buying <i>with borrowed money</i> because the price is going up.<p>That ends badly. It ends badly for the lenders. So when it starts to look like that's what's happening, a perfectly reasonable response is to change the margin requirements. When the circumstances are normal, use the normal margin requirements. But when the circumstances are abnormal, of course they should adjust.
Sure, but compare the price of silver to a year ago...
Trump announces Warsh and this happens. Can't be a coincidence.<p>Incidentally Warsh's father in law is billionaire Ronald Lauder who is trying to get Trump to capture Greenland. Sounds like father-in-law got him the role.<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/15/ronald-lauder-billionaire-donor-donald-trump-ukraine-greenland" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/15/ronald-laude...</a>
It'll recover that 30%+ within a week or two.
IMO this is temporary. Why?<p>1. Geopolitics. Globalization is dying. See 3.<p>2. Debt. Countries refuse to tax or do austerity. The only thing left is to destroy their currency by printing away their debt.<p>3. Preparation for a new global war which requires massive spending.<p>4. Basel III which made gold tier one. Unallocated gold does not qualify as a tier 1 asset
The headline is incorrect. It's Silver ETFs that tumbled, not silver.<p>The event I'm betting on is Silver shortage and the removal of ETFs from chart price calculations. Though this price drop may be a delay... Or maybe lower prices could hasten demand, leading to that scenario.<p>Precious metals is a weird market I guess as price rises can drive demand just as well as price drops.
A friend had taken out a second mortgage to buy a ton of silver at the highs, they are not doing good. His wife doesn’t know.
Wouldn't even say this is interesting
This looks like an IQ test, but for who?
How do people feel about gold? To me it is purely speculative vs. index funds. If I were rich mabe have a bit of gold for the bunker next to the long life tinned gourmet meals. Better than fiat but not as good as company investments.
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At least there's still money in the speculative Pokemon card market!<p>/s
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> Most of Trump's voters are retail gold and silver investors<p>I think you meant "most retail gold and silver investors are Trump voters".
I have a good enough sample of both Democrat and Republican friends; all my Republican friends have invested mostly in gold, and I haven't discussed silver with anyone, yet none of my Democrat friends have invested in precious metals... or maybe they just don't talk about it.
Wow, you really don't realize that your friend group is extremely biased to people with maxed out 401k's and more money than they know what do, do you?<p>Meanwhile, between 60 and 77% of Americans report living paycheck to paycheck.
Sure seems unlikely that your claim that most Trump voters trade commodities is even remotely close to true.
Well, of course, we only discuss people who not only want to invest in precious metals, but can also afford it.
Nah, you don't have to vote for him to realize that his presidency will be marked by volatility and a declining USD.<p>Plus in a couple years he will announce that the Washington Monument will be torn down and replaced with a solid gold statue of himself, creating yuge demand.
Not a Trump voter, I bought gold last spring when Trump started trying to fuck with the Federal Reserve. I figured the dollar was going to be toast, and it paid off for now.
> But an "asset" to lose 30% of its value in a day... Wow!<p>When prices are determined by speculation it do be do like that.
You think Apple's stock isn't also driven by speculation, just like any other stock?
I bought back when it was pre-$15/oz. Though, for awhile it was fun to think I had $100,000 in my floor safe. But it's not a speculative investment, that's my "bribe my family's way out of the country" money.<p>If anything, I hope it falls low again, I haven't been buying any junk silver the last few years and I should have been doing that.
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I knew that Silver prices were going all time high but I had still assumed that Silver (and to that extent Gold) were stable.<p>Looks like atleast for Silver, that gets completely thrown out of the window now for some time.<p>I also thought Gold was a safe haven but I checked and it seems that it lost (10%?)-ish as well.<p>I have some complex thoughts and reasonings but I really liked Gold as an idea but looks like it is vulnerable to volatility at times too.<p>I used to think that maybe banks can have gold itself and gold usually does or ~ equal to inflation itself rise and I mean theoretically net I think even this year it does definitely beat Inflation (I mean it grew double I guess in 1 year) but for banking concerns especially supposing someone got money this time and let's hypothetically assume they get into this gold bank, then its still volatile & they could've lost 10% and then tried to withdraw money and more short squeeze so the idea has a major flaw after this incident.<p>I wonder how swiss franc is doing. I looked at it and it looks like its doing fine (1% down but I do feel like that's really okay) given how Swiss franc (seeing another cnbc article or yahoo finance ig) grew what 13-14%<p>Although the problem with people holding swiss franc is that when I searched swiss franc I found this article (from CNBC itself) which actually shows how a strong swiss franc might be/is bad for swiss economy<p><a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/28/swiss-franc-us-dollar-price-fx-exchange-rate-trump-switzerland-snb-currency.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/28/swiss-franc-us-dollar-price-...</a><p>I do wonder, then what's the ideal solution of "safety"<p>I am scratching a lot of options now & I am either thinking US inflation protected assets or World Equity are the only two stable/(really valuable) because the whole essense of value behind gold/silver was its stability which especially for silver feels broken but gold isn't that far behind either.<p>Although atleast in my original context of banking, I later came to know about the concept of narrow banking and how there was a bank which actually wanted to invest in TIPS itself but that was blocked off by the feds for many reason.<p>I do feel like TIPS might protect inflation protection but they don't really protect the erosion of wealth because I feel like (I am not sure I can be wrong I usually am) but the pricing of houses and other assets are rising higher than inflation rises & inflation itself can vary depending (so housing rent inflation might be higher) & depending on your lifestyle. Maybe TIPS really wouldn't be able to help you to say.. save to get house or really have you give the ability for money to do what it actually does. To me the idea of inflation includes buying houses too so if say someone with some salary was able to buy a house 20 years ago then imo when I consider inflation protection or investing or anything in general, I expect that my wealth could be able to buy me things ~generally at a good amount & that's the point of good investing to get good returns at understandable/ your own risk profile.<p>I guess now I am personally more inclined towards world index funds in general I guess as a form of real stability where value gains are still backed by real gains (Something which I feel is core philosophy of the bogle philosphy & the reason why people should invest in first place)<p>I may have gotten a bit off topic here but coming on the point again here about Silver.<p>Would this be considered as (expected?) or is it a black swan event especially considering the 30% fall off.<p>From the headline, it feels like a black swan event (especially when they compare it to 1980's) but I am curious to know what others think too. I do feel like these black swan events really shift how we think tho & we can have it in our better judgement for future ig imo.
Fair to assume trillions of the physical metal weren't simultaneously dumped onto the market in the past day; this is entirely ETF driven therefore it's also safe to assume there is manipulation taking place to drive the price down.<p>What I don't understand is why, when there appear to be signs of a supply shortage, market forces appear to want to drive the price down and cause any remaining inventory to flow towards China where there is a $30~/oz arbitrage to be made.