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.
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.
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.
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.
I said no thank you and left, miffed, thinking he was jerking me around.
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.
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 :(
They're incredibly sleazy scumbags. They buy silver coins at bullion-value or below, which is the lowest grade you can get for a coin, making a small profit on everything they buy and massive profits on the ones that are actually worth something as coins rather than bullion. And it's typically elderly people they rip off, who are thrilled to get the price of a cup of coffee for their 1884S Morgan dollar. Never, ever deal with these predators.
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.
Why California? Most pawn shops suck (see Pawn Stars where they offer like 1/3 of the value on most stuff), but you might find a few pawn shops that want to deal with metals and coins. The best thing to do is to shop around a bit when trying to sell anything.
When the price moves violently up or down, dealers get scared. They need to keep it for an unspecified amount of time to get paid. Maybe the guy was jerking you around, or maybe he was short on cash. $35 for an oz is a terrible price when spot is $90 or something. It hit $120 during this past week and only crashed today, back to the record high from like 2 weeks ago.
> I didn’t realize the price of silver was collapsing.
Wait. It "collapsed" to the price it was on the 9th of january 2026. Which back then was it's all-time high.
FWIW I hold SLV (a BlackRock/iShares ETF on silver, the biggest and most liquid silver ETF in the world) since $26. I noticed the recent craze. So I bought PUTs when it was at $102, protecting me at a strike of $96. These PUTs were pricey but, so far, worth it. But here comes the kicker: I'm financing those PUTs by selling CALLs on SLV (that simple options strategy is called a "collar").
And as I'm a silverbug, I own silver coins too. But these aren't liquid as you noticed.
When you trade paper silver (like the ETF SLV), the price of the market is the price of the market. SLV is not 100% following an ounce of silver's price, but SLV's market price is SLV's market price. It was $105 at close yesterday and $75 at close today and that's just the price of SLV.
I do like that: not getting ripped off by some side-of-the-road hustler.
That dude giving you $80 then giving you $35 is taking a more than 50% cut compared to the nearest low of day. That's quite a rip off.
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.
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.
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.
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 if they buy it at all. That money tied up has an opportunity cost.
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.
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.
Sir banks (at least the sane ones, like JPM) are both long and short on behalf of their clients and simply because they’re dealers and prime brokers all the time and just settle physical, which they also own (because they’re sane).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think people are thrilled with Warsh as much as they are relieved it wasn't Hassett or like Kevin O'Leary or something really insane. Warsh has relevant experience and knowledge. He is too close to Trump (and Ron Lauder) but hopefully knows better than to cause havoc.
Fun Fact about the Great Depression - RCA is the Poster-child of exuberance and Tesla has had a higher PE for >2 years.
Meme stocks might coincide with meme coins - but I don't know if it's fair to blame crypto for everything.
I think the reality is that - for whatever reason - people are willing to take on MUCH greater risk today for reward than they were prior to the pandemic.
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.
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.
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.
> I think the reality is that… people are willing to take on MUCH greater risk today for reward than they were prior to the pandemic.
I’ll quibble that people have no idea of the risks they’re taking. I read somewhere that amateur stock traders spent something like 4 minutes researching their purchase. Balanced portfolios are just too boring and tedious.
dogecoin has tail emission vs bitcoin which has a finite emission. that is also something to consider. Maybe better to compare market caps? Dunno. Also, over time we have seen the development of more non-doge memecoins.
The hype around physical silver has been astounding in 2025 and so far in 2026.
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...
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.
Everyone is focused on commodities and ignoring basically the entire global market got shook today. Bonds, indices, commodities, and securities all got tanked. Nothing in my portfolio was in the green today, and I generally invest conservatively since it’s my (maybe, hopefully, someday) house down payment at stake.
That said, I agree with you that this feels like a bunch of prominent exits to convert paper profits into actual ones. The underlying problems remain and will become increasingly exacerbated as the year drags on.
I figure I’ll recover losses by this time next year if I just refrain from panic selling.
I'm not sure a 6 month window with a squished Y axis to make the graph a perfect 45 degree angle line means much. How it compares to currencies and other assets would be more interesting.
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
About one third of this demand (photographic film and paper) more or less evaporated in the 2000s. You don't see that on the price chart, so I don't think you can seriously argue that the price is dictated by industrial uses.
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.
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.
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.
One day that will happen and the trend will reverse, but it's always more probable that a trend continues.
If you look at the history of related funds, you’ll see that there is volatility when the price gets sufficiently high as people early exit, and that historically it has gone up higher, then once the market is milked dry, it goes way down again for some years.
This has happened multiple times. You may not be able to guarantee it, but I strongly suspect precious metals are a repeating pump-and-dump scheme. It could be money waiting to be made by those that see the pattern, or maybe it won’t happen, who knows?
Anyone with long experience trading commodities would have expected this.
This is like the least surprising thing ever.
It is amusing reading the comments on here. Silver dropped 50% in 1980. Silver is the original memecoin. I think people care less though about market events that happened before they were born. It is like the way I know the entire story of silver in 1980 even though I was a little kid but nothing about the Nifty Fifty a decade earlier.
Nothing for me with commodities will ever top -$37 per barrel during Covid with oil. That was a level of market shell shock for me that I just can't imagine being topped.
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.
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.
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.
Healthy for markets but I am guessing this will conflict heavily with the politics.
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.
People want to get rich quick.
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.
> a never ending list of people that will tell them how
you mean like these trading Bros parachuting onto a yacht and placing a trade and telling me that I could do this too with the correct mindset from their exclusive Telegram group?
Gold has been going up for years now. I don’t know how much TikTok influencers influence the price. Seems to be mostly central banks and the falling apart of the international order that’s driving a neutral and unsanctionable tradeable asset up.
Gold reverted to the price it was wait for it 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.
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.
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.
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" 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
It is very hard to pump the metals. The markets for them are just too big. You'd need whole countries buying to make a dent. Miners are another story. Those can be pumped and dumped like any other stock.
This is a prime example of being confidently wrong. As another commenter put it (paraphrased) if you think a few Tiktokers can move the global silver market then you're a deeply unserious person.
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.
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.
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.
I didn't invest and generally avoid anything other than s&p500, ftse 100 and just letting money compound over time (because if I wanted to really gamble I would go Las Vegas) but I wonder how many 'ordinary' people are silently getting burned out there by how much hype there is now online.
Unless you are talking about owning a casino, I can't think of any interpretation of what you are saying that is true. Index funds have a long history of steady growth. Las Vegas businesses make their profits off of the reliable losses of their customers.
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.)
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.
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.
If you were to turn that bullion into an actual product like jewelry, then it would be taxed.
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.
Unmonetized gold bullion is similarly generally intended for resale. Generally no one is “consuming” gold bullion.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can you please make your substantive points without snark, flamebait, swipes, or personal attack? Regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are, you can make your substantive points without these things. We're trying for something else here.
Energy and Materials were among the most notionally net sold US sectors this week, GS Prime Book: US Long/Short Ratio (MV) driven by both short and long sales. Collectively, this week's $ net selling across the two sectors was the *largest since April '25* and ranks in the 96th percentile vs. the past five years.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 everybody has to put up more collateral even if you're significantly in the black.
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].
As for China, the government is ensuring their local industries have sufficient silver supply, which is particularly important for solar.
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.
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 with borrowed money because the price is going up.
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.
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.
Trump announces Warsh and this happens. Can't be a coincidence.
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.
Warsh played a substantive role in addressing the financial crisis in 2008 and has a lot of relationships and respect across financial markets.
How independent will he be? Who knows. But folks believe he is at least knowledgeable and competent. Which is not widely believed of all the president’s appointees.
The headline is incorrect. It's Silver ETFs that tumbled, not silver.
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.
Precious metals is a weird market I guess as price rises can drive demand just as well as price drops.
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.
I think gold will keep going up over the next few years, because many central banks are converting from dollar reserves to gold. That means very large demand which is mostly price-insensitive.
I am super confused about the markets stance on gold, silver and the dollar.
Did the market consider Powell the cause of a weak dollar and not Trump? I thought Powell was what was standing between the dollar and complete recklessness.
As someone who has been actively trading silver for the past year, the real reason that silver plummeted is because:
1) the market was looking for an excuse and the new Fed chain nominee was as good a reason as anything.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nah, you don't have to vote for him to realize that his presidency will be marked by volatility and a declining USD.
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.
I knew that Silver prices were going all time high but I had still assumed that Silver (and to that extent Gold) were stable.
Looks like atleast for Silver, that gets completely thrown out of the window now for some time.
I also thought Gold was a safe haven but I checked and it seems that it lost (10%?)-ish as well.
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.
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.
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%
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
I do wonder, then what's the ideal solution of "safety"
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.
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.
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.
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)
I may have gotten a bit off topic here but coming on the point again here about Silver.
Would this be considered as (expected?) or is it a black swan event especially considering the 30% fall off.
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.
"Safe haven" and "lost 10% in one day (that it gained the previous week)" are not contradictory. "Safe haven" is "will retain value even if the dollar becomes worthless".
yes I can agree but I also assumed that it wouldn't be volatile and (could be?) used in place of a currency.
Well technically speaking gold rose so much in terms of $ for so long so technically if we were on gold standard, the value of $ would've lost too (and become volatile too)
So I get that part I guess but still I do feel like swiss francs are a more safe haven while not being volatile but looks like switzerland really doesn't want its currency to de-inflate.
It's an interesting thing for sure to find out I guess. I mean long term, gold is definitely hedge against inflation but so do other investment options for the most part.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I said no thank you and left, miffed, thinking he was jerking me around.
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.
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 :(
tbh, I never knew the value of coins was tied to the worth of the metal itself
Do these coins get smelted down or something?
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They're incredibly sleazy scumbags. They buy silver coins at bullion-value or below, which is the lowest grade you can get for a coin, making a small profit on everything they buy and massive profits on the ones that are actually worth something as coins rather than bullion. And it's typically elderly people they rip off, who are thrilled to get the price of a cup of coffee for their 1884S Morgan dollar. Never, ever deal with these predators.
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If you pulled out more product when offered $80, the price was only going to go down from there.
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.
I’ve also found a few in various states that buy Eagles for spot - of course then they’ll sell them forwards at spot + 15% or something
I’ve gotten them to sell under spot once bc they mispriced their inventory.
Why California? Most pawn shops suck (see Pawn Stars where they offer like 1/3 of the value on most stuff), but you might find a few pawn shops that want to deal with metals and coins. The best thing to do is to shop around a bit when trying to sell anything.
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When the price moves violently up or down, dealers get scared. They need to keep it for an unspecified amount of time to get paid. Maybe the guy was jerking you around, or maybe he was short on cash. $35 for an oz is a terrible price when spot is $90 or something. It hit $120 during this past week and only crashed today, back to the record high from like 2 weeks ago.
> I didn’t realize the price of silver was collapsing.
Wait. It "collapsed" to the price it was on the 9th of january 2026. Which back then was it's all-time high.
FWIW I hold SLV (a BlackRock/iShares ETF on silver, the biggest and most liquid silver ETF in the world) since $26. I noticed the recent craze. So I bought PUTs when it was at $102, protecting me at a strike of $96. These PUTs were pricey but, so far, worth it. But here comes the kicker: I'm financing those PUTs by selling CALLs on SLV (that simple options strategy is called a "collar").
And as I'm a silverbug, I own silver coins too. But these aren't liquid as you noticed.
When you trade paper silver (like the ETF SLV), the price of the market is the price of the market. SLV is not 100% following an ounce of silver's price, but SLV's market price is SLV's market price. It was $105 at close yesterday and $75 at close today and that's just the price of SLV.
I do like that: not getting ripped off by some side-of-the-road hustler.
That dude giving you $80 then giving you $35 is taking a more than 50% cut compared to the nearest low of day. That's quite a rip off.
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.
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.
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.
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 if they buy it at all. That money tied up has an opportunity cost.
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.
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.
Sir banks (at least the sane ones, like JPM) are both long and short on behalf of their clients and simply because they’re dealers and prime brokers all the time and just settle physical, which they also own (because they’re sane).
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.
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.
Thanks for that, that's a really good backgrounder on what's happening.
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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.
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.
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.
I don't think people are thrilled with Warsh as much as they are relieved it wasn't Hassett or like Kevin O'Leary or something really insane. Warsh has relevant experience and knowledge. He is too close to Trump (and Ron Lauder) but hopefully knows better than to cause havoc.
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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.
Meme stocks might coincide with meme coins - but I don't know if it's fair to blame crypto for everything.
I think the reality is that - for whatever reason - people are willing to take on MUCH greater risk today for reward than they were prior to the pandemic.
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.
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.
I think this is actually one the best meme indicators: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dogecoin/doge/btc/
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.
> I think the reality is that… people are willing to take on MUCH greater risk today for reward than they were prior to the pandemic.
I’ll quibble that people have no idea of the risks they’re taking. I read somewhere that amateur stock traders spent something like 4 minutes researching their purchase. Balanced portfolios are just too boring and tedious.
dogecoin has tail emission vs bitcoin which has a finite emission. that is also something to consider. Maybe better to compare market caps? Dunno. Also, over time we have seen the development of more non-doge memecoins.
But shouldn't everybody have equal access to these markets?
The hype around physical silver has been astounding in 2025 and so far in 2026.
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.
You are correct, but the truth is much uglier and deeper. All of this is scripted and controlled. It was planned for many, many years in advance.
GameStop = Gold. AMC = Silver. Same script, same playbook, same timing and everything, different name.
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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...
Gold has merely mean-reverted, not "crashed". Some profit-taking since gold got a bit ahead of itself.
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.
https://i.imgur.com/bRAy1FB.png
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.
Everyone is focused on commodities and ignoring basically the entire global market got shook today. Bonds, indices, commodities, and securities all got tanked. Nothing in my portfolio was in the green today, and I generally invest conservatively since it’s my (maybe, hopefully, someday) house down payment at stake.
That said, I agree with you that this feels like a bunch of prominent exits to convert paper profits into actual ones. The underlying problems remain and will become increasingly exacerbated as the year drags on.
I figure I’ll recover losses by this time next year if I just refrain from panic selling.
The market went down less than half a percent today? That’s not a great day but certainly not losses that are even notable
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Same with silver: It jus went back to its 20SMMA
I'm not sure a 6 month window with a squished Y axis to make the graph a perfect 45 degree angle line means much. How it compares to currencies and other assets would be more interesting.
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
> Silver has plenty of industrial uses.
About one third of this demand (photographic film and paper) more or less evaporated in the 2000s. You don't see that on the price chart, so I don't think you can seriously argue that the price is dictated by industrial uses.
Now look at what has happened to demand for silver for photovoltaic cells.
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.
But why is silver with export restrictions (Shanghai) trading above silver without said restrictions?
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The price of paper silver doesn’t match the price of buying the actual commodity, so it’s more likely that it’s being manipulated by “market makers”
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.
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.
One day that will happen and the trend will reverse, but it's always more probable that a trend continues.
If you look at the history of related funds, you’ll see that there is volatility when the price gets sufficiently high as people early exit, and that historically it has gone up higher, then once the market is milked dry, it goes way down again for some years.
This has happened multiple times. You may not be able to guarantee it, but I strongly suspect precious metals are a repeating pump-and-dump scheme. It could be money waiting to be made by those that see the pattern, or maybe it won’t happen, who knows?
We knew the correction was coming, but I don't think anyone expected the 30% move in one day.
Anyone with long experience trading commodities would have expected this. This is like the least surprising thing ever.
It is amusing reading the comments on here. Silver dropped 50% in 1980. Silver is the original memecoin. I think people care less though about market events that happened before they were born. It is like the way I know the entire story of silver in 1980 even though I was a little kid but nothing about the Nifty Fifty a decade earlier.
Nothing for me with commodities will ever top -$37 per barrel during Covid with oil. That was a level of market shell shock for me that I just can't imagine being topped.
Probably the opposite. Corrections happen quickly and all at once, somewhat similar to growth.
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.
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.
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.
Healthy for markets but I am guessing this will conflict heavily with the politics.
Big enough dip will cause algorithmic sell off I imagine deepening the dip.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.
maybe, but almost everyone will see the hot iron
George Gammon did, 24 hours beforehand
I cashed out :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3k9UqNA2l_4
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.
People want to get rich quick.
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.
> a never ending list of people that will tell them how
you mean like these trading Bros parachuting onto a yacht and placing a trade and telling me that I could do this too with the correct mindset from their exclusive Telegram group?
:-D
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> People want to get rich quick
What about Amish people? Or Buddhists?
Too early to tell. They're both up since 6 months ago. Could be another one of those flash crash events. Buckle up!
They're both up since like 8 days ago. This is one of those classic bullshit "dramatic change if you only look at today!!" stories.
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Gold has been going up for years now. I don’t know how much TikTok influencers influence the price. Seems to be mostly central banks and the falling apart of the international order that’s driving a neutral and unsanctionable tradeable asset up.
Gold reverted to the price it was wait for it 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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> TikTok influencers
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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It is very hard to pump the metals. The markets for them are just too big. You'd need whole countries buying to make a dent. Miners are another story. Those can be pumped and dumped like any other stock.
On Gold? You know the market is 35 trillion dollars?
Do you have any idea how much you'd need to pump?
A good portion of that has been hoarded since biblical times, and has not been in actual "circulation" ever.
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This is a prime example of being confidently wrong. As another commenter put it (paraphrased) if you think a few Tiktokers can move the global silver market then you're a deeply unserious person.
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.
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.
I was with you till the last paragraph. Banks having a huge short position is a false conspiracy theory.
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I agree, Gold is a 35 trillion dollar market. There is no pump and dump.
What happened to HN, people are totally fine with fanciful ideas suddenly.
Normies found it?
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Unnecessarily toxic. How about you give your interpretation instead of making us infer it.
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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.
This article does a reasonable job of laying out some of the drivers:
https://markets.financialcontent.com/stocks/article/marketmi...
https://robinjbrooks.substack.com/p/everything-you-need-to-k...
> Gold is now up 50 percent since August 2
SP500 with reinvestment for comparison is 72%
NVidia without reinvestment 900%
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I didn't invest and generally avoid anything other than s&p500, ftse 100 and just letting money compound over time (because if I wanted to really gamble I would go Las Vegas) but I wonder how many 'ordinary' people are silently getting burned out there by how much hype there is now online.
I think it will still go up. Banking regulations changed, US dollar dropping. Industrial use going through the roof.
This is a mid term investment. Probably see $70 and a slow build to $200 a once in two years.
You are probably right, but for the wrong reasons =3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_cat_bounce
The stock market is not a place most amateurs make money. In some cases Vegas would give you better odds. lol =3
Unless you are talking about owning a casino, I can't think of any interpretation of what you are saying that is true. Index funds have a long history of steady growth. Las Vegas businesses make their profits off of the reliable losses of their customers.
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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.)
What about GLD (SPDR)? I've been investing in a gold derivative for nearly a year and haven't touched a physical object yet.
Bullion has a pretty specific meaning, I doubt shares in gold derivatives could be construed as bullion.
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.
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.
If you were to turn that bullion into an actual product like jewelry, then it would be taxed.
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.
Unmonetized gold bullion is similarly generally intended for resale. Generally no one is “consuming” gold bullion.
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Washington State will do anything to avoid just having an income tax.
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Buy and keep it elsewhere? Buy futures?
The law covers "monetized bullion" - bars and coins -https://dor.wa.gov/education/industry-guides/jewelry-stores/...
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.
Oregon just south of you has no sales tax
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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Gold hasn't been money since 1971.
> What other taxes are they passing when you say “frenzy”?
https://www.ballardspahr.com/insights/alerts-and-articles/20...
It's incomplete, it doesn't list the gold tax.
https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary/?BillNumber=1386&Year=202...
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.
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Is taxing investment absurd?
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Can you please make your substantive points without snark, flamebait, swipes, or personal attack? Regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are, you can make your substantive points without these things. We're trying for something else here.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
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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.
Energy and Materials were among the most notionally net sold US sectors this week, GS Prime Book: US Long/Short Ratio (MV) driven by both short and long sales. Collectively, this week's $ net selling across the two sectors was the *largest since April '25* and ranks in the 96th percentile vs. the past five years.
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.
If memory serves, 1980 was the time of the silver corner by a couple of brothers.
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.
The Hunt brothers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday
Rise your hand if you have been holding a leveraged positions which is now vaporised :-D
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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday
[2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-28/cme-raise...
[3]: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4861917-why-silver-prices-i...
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.
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.
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.
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 everybody has to put up more collateral even if you're significantly in the black.
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].
As for China, the government is ensuring their local industries have sufficient silver supply, which is particularly important for solar.
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.
[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ryanlemand_this-chart-is-wort...
[2]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/everything-investors-know-his...
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 with borrowed money because the price is going up.
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.
$SLV is still up 125% in the past 6 months after this "collapse" which is absolutely bananas.
*Paper silver. The gap widens
What goes up quickly comes down quickly?
At least we can afford nice things again
Temporarily
Sure, but compare the price of silver to a year ago...
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'll recover that 30%+ within a week or two.
Wouldn't even say this is interesting
It's looks like a flash crash. Somewhat rare, and from an algorithm perspective it's interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_crash
This looks like an IQ test, but for who?
For those on wrong side of options contracts expiring? I would guess that this is paper silver being manipulated.
Indeed. There’s a large delta between paper silver and Shanghai physical silver prices right now.
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Trump announces Warsh and this happens. Can't be a coincidence.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/15/ronald-laude...
Warsh played a substantive role in addressing the financial crisis in 2008 and has a lot of relationships and respect across financial markets.
How independent will he be? Who knows. But folks believe he is at least knowledgeable and competent. Which is not widely believed of all the president’s appointees.
"The last full, comprehensive audit of Fort Knox's gold reserves was in 1953". This was one of Trump's broken promises.
Unless you have physical metal you are just gambling on a videogame playing against the dev studio.
IMO this is temporary. Why?
1. Geopolitics. Globalization is dying. See 3.
2. Debt. Countries refuse to tax or do austerity. The only thing left is to destroy their currency by printing away their debt.
3. Preparation for a new global war which requires massive spending.
4. Basel III which made gold tier one. Unallocated gold does not qualify as a tier 1 asset
Thanks for Nr. 4 - wasnt aware of!
The headline is incorrect. It's Silver ETFs that tumbled, not silver.
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.
Precious metals is a weird market I guess as price rises can drive demand just as well as price drops.
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.
I think gold will keep going up over the next few years, because many central banks are converting from dollar reserves to gold. That means very large demand which is mostly price-insensitive.
I am super confused about the markets stance on gold, silver and the dollar.
Did the market consider Powell the cause of a weak dollar and not Trump? I thought Powell was what was standing between the dollar and complete recklessness.
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.
I think it was in the news when a family did that to buy Bitcoin many, many years ago.
Not telling the spouse is pretty bad though.
Top is in if true.
Exactly.
As someone who has been actively trading silver for the past year, the real reason that silver plummeted is because:
1) the market was looking for an excuse and the new Fed chain nominee was as good a reason as anything.
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.
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.
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.
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
I don't see how world risk changed overnight. To me, that means these market bubbles are financialization Ponzi schemes unmoored from fundamentals.
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At least there's still money in the speculative Pokemon card market!
/s
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> But an "asset" to lose 30% of its value in a day... Wow!
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?
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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.
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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> Most of Trump's voters are retail gold and silver investors
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.
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Nah, you don't have to vote for him to realize that his presidency will be marked by volatility and a declining USD.
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.
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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.
Looks like atleast for Silver, that gets completely thrown out of the window now for some time.
I also thought Gold was a safe haven but I checked and it seems that it lost (10%?)-ish as well.
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.
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.
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%
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
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/28/swiss-franc-us-dollar-price-...
I do wonder, then what's the ideal solution of "safety"
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.
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.
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.
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)
I may have gotten a bit off topic here but coming on the point again here about Silver.
Would this be considered as (expected?) or is it a black swan event especially considering the 30% fall off.
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.
> I do wonder, then what's the ideal solution of "safety"
This universe doesn’t guarantee safety, but you can mitigate risk via a diversified portfolio.
> This universe doesn’t guarantee safety, but you can mitigate risk via a diversified portfolio.
I guess you are right but I don't think its the universe itself but rather the people's speculation which can technically be considered universe.
Personally, I really love diversified portfolio as well.
"Safe haven" and "lost 10% in one day (that it gained the previous week)" are not contradictory. "Safe haven" is "will retain value even if the dollar becomes worthless".
yes I can agree but I also assumed that it wouldn't be volatile and (could be?) used in place of a currency.
Well technically speaking gold rose so much in terms of $ for so long so technically if we were on gold standard, the value of $ would've lost too (and become volatile too)
So I get that part I guess but still I do feel like swiss francs are a more safe haven while not being volatile but looks like switzerland really doesn't want its currency to de-inflate.
It's an interesting thing for sure to find out I guess. I mean long term, gold is definitely hedge against inflation but so do other investment options for the most part.
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.
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.