Here’s everything investors need to know about the historic silver rally in 10 charts

Wild swings on a daily basis have helped push 30-day realized volatility to one of the highest levels on record.

Prices for March Silver futures fell by more than 4% on Friday. That was the seventh swing of 4% or more since the start of 2026, FactSet data showed.

Surging demand for physical silver has pushed the market for the white metal out of whack.

As of Friday, prices for spot silver traded in London — the hub for physical metals — were slightly higher than the price of the futures contract that expires in January. Metals futures are traded in New York, the hub for the global metals derivatives market.

In commodity markets, this unusual dynamic where spot prices eclipse futures prices is known as backwardation. It means investors are demanding such a high convenience yield to hold the physical commodity that it is dwarfing costs for storage and other inputs that are usually factored into futures prices.

“This means that the market is very tight,” said James Steel, chief precious-metals analyst at HSBC Securities.

Speculative fervor and a supply deficit of newly mined silver have contributed to the run-up in prices.

But worries about a looming trade clampdown in the U.S. helped prices start rolling higher, HSBC’s Steel said. Evidence of this can be found in the supply data for vaults operated by Comex: Beginning early last year, there was a large migration of supplies of physical silver out of the vaults in London and into the vaults in New York. The first chart below shows how this impacted supplies held in New York.

Meanwhile, data on holdings from the London Bullion Market Association show the migration away from the city’s vaults.

“There was a threat of tariffs, and it resulted in the migration of hundreds of millions of ounces of silver into New York. The bulk of this has not gone back to London, despite the fact that tariffs weren’t applied,” Steel said.

“Because the market has been drained of liquidity and drained of physicality, if you want to secure physical silver, you have to pay up,” he added.

Metals markets have a distinct psychology. Oftentimes, when one sees gold prices start to move higher, it is only a matter of time before silver and other precious metals give chase.

That is exactly how this most recent rally in precious metals has unfolded.

“What happens on bullion desks is that the gold market goes up $50 or $100, and client XYZ, who hasn’t bought enough of it, calls the desk and asks, ‘Should I buy silver?’” Steel said. “They don’t know anything about silver, they don’t know anything about gold — but because gold has moved and silver hasn’t, they think they can grab the lag.”

The chart above shows that, in the span of a year, silver has gone from being very cheap, relative to gold, to very expensive.

Some have chalked this up to speculators piling in, driven by “FOMO” — or the “fear of missing out.”

“Silver is swept up in FOMO,” said Clem Chambers, CEO of Online Blockchain. “FOMO-ers are exit liquidity.”

Research shops that specifically monitor activity by independent investors have reported a huge rush of buying over the past month or so.

According to the latest data from Vanda Research, small-time amateur investors have helped to turn silver into the most crowded commodity trade in the market, with 30-day retail inflows recently hitting a record of $921.8 million.

The data below is gleaned from the VandaTrack proprietary data set, which uses custom models to identify retail trades in silver-linked ETFs.

Money has been flowing into popular products like the ProShares Ultra Silver ETF AGQ, which aims to amplify daily moves in silver, as well as the Sprott Physical Silver Trust PSLV and iShares Silver Trust SLV, which allow investors to gain exposure to spot silver and silver futures.

Also, more recently, inflows into the ProShares UltraShort Silver ETF ZSL have started to pick up, even as the ETF has fallen by more than 90% over the past year.

“This is an asset that has doubled in value in roughly three months,” said Gina Martin Adams, chief market strategist at HB Wealth. “I can understand why investors want to play both sides of the trade after such an extraordinary move.”

In addition to surging demand from industrial players, the price of silver has also benefited from escalating geopolitical concerns, Martin Adams said. Some have said uneasiness with heavy government debt loads in the developed world has contributed as well, a concept referred to as the “debasement trade.”

The imbalance between silver supply and silver demand became particularly acute in 2025, according to HSBC’s Steel, and figures from the Silver Institute showed a supply deficit of 230 million ounces.

But based on Steel’s models, that deficit is expected to shrink in 2026 and 2027 — as the run-up in prices forces industrial buyers to be more economical, while denting demand for silver jewelry.

Speculators in the futures market remain overwhelmingly long silver, according to weekly data on trader positioning published by the CFTC. Meanwhile, short interest remains notably low, HSBC’s Steel noted.

Options traders have also taken an interest in silver.

RJO Futures’ Haberkorn pointed out that open interest in out-of-the-money strikes on silver options has surged.

Each contract controls 5,000 ounces of silver. At Friday’s prices, that would mean these contracts alone have a notional value of more than $182 million, by MarketWatch’s calculations.

That doesn’t necessarily mean silver will make it to $125 by April. Signs of extreme bullishness among speculators often suggest that a rally might be due for a pullback, HSBC’s Steel said.

But, according to Haberkorn, it appears a handful of investors are making big bets that the price surge will continue.

In a sign of how historically dramatic the rally in silver has been, futures prices have reached levels above some widely followed trend trackers that haven’t been seen since the 1980s.

Silver futures traded earlier this week 46.7% above the 50-day moving average, a metric many on Wall Street use as a guide to the short-term trend. The last time silver futures traded that far above that technical level, according to a MarketWatch analysis of FactSet data, was April 1987 — at a time when the U.S. dollar DXY was sinking, inflation was rising and the Iran-Iraq War was escalating.

Futures also traded as much as 105.9% above the 200-day moving average, which is seen as a key long-term trend tracker. The last time that happened was in January and February of 1980, when the Hunt Brothers tried to corner the silver market.

Silver prices had another strong week, rising more than 11%, even if they ended on a down note. Futures for March delivery, the most active contract, settled at $88.537 an ounce on Friday, off $3.81, or 4.1%.

Myra P. Saefong, Tomi Kilgore and Mike DeStefano contributed.

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