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Seventeen days ago, silver was $90/oz from APMEX. That was list price of a 1oz round, shipped and everything. Spot price was ~$80.
Today, it's $120 shipped, $110 spot, over +30% in a little over two weeks.
Gold is at $5185 for a single round delivered to your door, up from 4650, or 11%. Using spot it's about 12%.
Is this hyperinflation? Is this de-dollarization? A bubble? Does this have anything to do with Venezuela? With Iran? Taiwan? AI?
I'm honestly grasping at straws here, because metals aren't supposed to do this. I've been worried about the specter of hyperinflation since 2008, but it never really materialized, and so my worries were able to be soothed by looking at the lack of hyperinflation in reality.
You can't even tell anything happened in 2008 when you look at the money supply, but you can't help but notice that we've nearly x5 the money supply since December 2019.
Then again, silver is a useful metal. It gets blown up in missiles, it gets used in microchips and electronics, solar and battery technology, and more. Business building these things will simply pay the price for the metal they need and then use it, driving the price up regardless of speculation, but I can't believe that the usefulness of silver has quadrupled in the time since it was going for $25/oz.
China recently added export controls on silver in 2026.
The US added silver to the Critical Minerals list in November 2025.
Declining confidence in the US leads foreign investors to look for alternative investments to US treasuries/dollars.
Part of the move could just be short positioning being forced to cover. When the price moves quickly in a short time and there are a lot of people using leverage then margin requirements can cause some positions to be forcibly liquidated - which causes the price spike to go even higher for a short period of time.
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This is where my obsessive buying silver rounds and sitting on them pays off in spades, were I the sort of person who sells things once I've bought them...
Alas my collection is going to keep sitting in my closet for me to sporadically enjoy looking at. I'm actually pretty pissed off by the price jumps because it means everyday silver objects I'd have liked to buy for daily use are now so expensive that even I am passing them over (a standard silver spoon is now over £100...). Plus I have a list of gold jewelry pieces I wanted to commission but put off over the last few years that are now looking like they aren't gonna happen. Honestly this sucks and I hope the precious metal retail investors driving these prices up to stupid levels lose their shirts.
My father-in-law gave all his kids ~10k in precious metals for Christmas and I'm irrationally annoyed by this because if it was cash I'd use it for stuff with a baby on the way and round off the emergency fund but I don't want sell my small pirate treasure hoard that I'd probably never get around to building again.
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How does one go about investing in precious metals?
physical at your local dealer, futures, miner stocks/etfs (indirect, consider it a 2-3x leverage on the metal itself)
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You can buy them from online retailers for a premium over the metal cost. The premium will depend on retailer markup and also on what, specifically, the piece you're buying is; generally for coins state issued pieces have a higher premium than privately minted ones(these latter are called 'rounds' to clarify that they are not legal tender but are in other ways identical to coins) and bars/ingots will have higher premiums the smaller the piece is. Retailers will give a discount for paying in crypto and ship to your house in a package from a fake business so no one knows it contains precious metal. To cash in, pawn shops and coin stores will generally buy at a slight discount from the metals cost- this could still be worth it if it goes up enough in the meantime.
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Are you trying to swing trade it, or are you trying to hedge against financial collapse?
Considering the latter.
Store your silver in a cool dark place. Those mint tubes are great, and you can place silica gels in there with them.
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Then you need to have the physical metal in your personal possession. There are brick-and-mortar gold and silver shops in most cities. I assume you can just walk in and buy some. Expect a moderate markup though.
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If one really wants to invest in precious metals and doesn’t feel comfortable maintaining futures positions: GLD for gold, SLV for silver, and GLTR for a basket of gold, silver, palladium, and platinum are three popular choices.
Note that these are all relatively expensive, with expense ratios of 0.4%, 0.5%, and 0.6%, respectively, compared to well-diversified stock and bond ETFs/MFs. I personally have never bothered with precious metals (or commodities in general) and would not recommend dedicating a large portion of one’s portfolio toward them.
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Buy from eBay and put it under your mattress.
Buy from Costco, when they offer it.
PSLV is the only paper silver stock I trust, there's definitely paper silver distorting the market.
Junior miners? I made some money in the last month on CDE and NEM. I lost some money today on HL, AG, USAS, and EXK. Probably should have just stuck with SILJ or just SIL.
Mostly its been buy and hold the physical metal for me, but WA wants 10% sales tax converting my paper money to metal money, so I'm back to the tickers.
Wow Washingon is really going to shit recently.
You are not kidding. Democrat trifecta rule is awful.
You can't blame this on the Democrats. New Jersey eliminated its sales tax on coins and bullion by unanimous vote while having an all-Democrat government.
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Markets do stupid shit all the time now. Best analysis I’ve seen in production costs are $25/30 per ounce and solar power profits collapse to $0 at $125 an ounce. Bitcoin has collapsed right now too. It’s probably free money shorting over 1-2 years if you can handle the volatility of supply and demand balancing while retail punters work thru the market. Mstr raised like $50b last year for an etf at a 4x premium to bitcoin so there has been plenty of the markets do stupid things now.
You likely need the price level to go up 4x so $25/ounce mining becomes $100/ounce or very big changes in supply needs for AI chips that has to be silver. The best I can tell a lot of industrial demand disappears in this $120 area within a year and longer a lot of supply can enter the market around $30
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In May 2020 FRED changed it's definition of M1 to include savings accounts, which is why there's a huge spike in specifically that month. If you switch the graph from billions of dollars to % change this is much clearer. Changes in M1 (percentage wise) seem to have been pretty similar before and after (perhaps even less volatile after), based on my eyeballing the graph. They have a blog post explaining it.
M2 goes +500 +1000 +800 in the same timeframe.
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It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Seriously, whose idea was this? We should have just kept calling the old definition M1, and created the new definition as M1.5 or M1b or something. Instead we've got a definition of M1 that's so screwed up, explaining precisely how screwed up it is is a famous problem in philosophy.
My impression is that continuing to construct the previous series was not really practicable. The blog post talks about this a little bit. The change in the definition wasn't arbitrary. The fed changed a regulation that required "savings" accounts be permitted no more than 6 withdrawals a month, otherwise the account had to classified as a "transaction" account. Transaction accounts are included in M1 but savings accounts aren't. They also count differently for capitalization requirements. It sounds like when the fed changed the rules about limited withdrawals banks largely started reporting all their accounts as "transaction" accounts, and therefore contributing to M1. So the fed can't really construct the old M1 anymore because they relied on banks to make the relevant distinction between accounts and banks largely stopped making that distinction in reports to the fed once it no longer served a purpose.
There's actually a little blurb under the FRED chart noting this discontinuity in definition for the M1 and M2 measures.
Oh that's why banks did that! Thanks.
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Yeah, that makes sense, but defining a new measure that we can calculate and giving it the same name isn't actually a solution to our inability to keep calculating the old measure, it's just a very interesting case of the streetlight effect error. We should end our M1 graphs at the date where we can no longer calculate the original M1 definition, start our "M1b" graphs at the date where we have enough data to calculate the new M1b definition, and never plot them as the same line on the same graph. OP here isn't the first or even the tenth person I've seen who didn't realize that that graph discontinuity was an artifact of a definition change, despite (or, really, because of) the paragraphs underneath that are needed to explain that.
That's fair. I think it's a hard problem that I don't have a strong opinion on. In the case the fed chose, there's the obvious potential for confusion due to a very dramatic change in the graph. Notwithstanding any kind of clarifying text on the page. On the other hand, if you create a new series it can be hard to discover that the old series exists, when it might be useful. FRED actually already has at least one discontinued M1 series, which was weekly data.
My perception is that, from FRED's perspective, they are still reporting the "same" thing (the sum of some field on a report bank's file with them). If they changed their underlying methodology I suspect they would discontinue the old series and create a new one (as with the weekly data) but in this case it's the reporting entities whose behavior changed.
That's really interesting!
From a discoverability standpoint I'd think that the solution would be a simple hyperlink - the discontinued M1 page has a link to the new M1SL; just add a link in the other direction too and we're good.
But from a epistemological standpoint? The mathematician in me wants to say that it's silly to call the new data a new series, so long as it's the same thing being measured, even if it's evaluated with a different frequency. But the engineer in me is bowing in awe to whomever decided something like "we're using a different evaluation process at the lower frequency, therefore it's a different measurement even if it's the same measurand, therefore we're putting it in a different series".
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