Silver peaked near $116 in January, fell to around $55 in July, and has climbed back. What that round trip actually feels like.
I can admit this now, because enough time has passed that it counts as a lesson rather than a wound. There was a stretch this year when I stopped opening one particular corner of my portfolio. I told myself it was discipline. It was avoidance wearing discipline’s coat.
The corner I was not looking at was silver.
The round trip
Consider what the metal has done in a little over half a year. Around the end of January, it peaked near $116 an ounce, with gold at the same moment just under 5600 an ounce. Both were extraordinary numbers, and the coverage was euphoric as coverage always is at a top.
By the middle of July, silver had fallen to roughly $55, a seven-month low. That is a decline of around half from the peak, in six months, in an asset that a great many cautious savers hold precisely because they think of it as the sensible corner of the shelf.
This week it is back above $60, a seven-week high, with gold at $4300. Those figures are directional and move constantly, so check them against a live source before you lean on them.
If you glanced only at the start and the end of that period, you would conclude that not much happened. The chart would show a wiggle; a wiggle containing a considerable amount of human misery.
Why it moved
The reasons are not mysterious, which is part of what makes them useful.
Silver is two things at once and never quite decides which. It is a store of value, so it responds to inflation expectations, interest rate bets, and plain fear. It is also an industrial metal used in solar panels, electronics and electricity grids, so it responds to whether the manufacturing factories are busy. Chinese imports of silver-bearing ores rose sharply in June against the same month a year earlier, which tells you the industrial half of the story is very much alive.
Then there is oil. When the prospect of the Strait of Hormuz reopening pulled crude down, inflation expectations reset lower, and with them the odds that central banks would resume raising rates. Cheaper money flatters a metal that pays you nothing to hold. That chain runs in the opposite direction to the reflex most people carry, which is that calm geopolitics ought to be bad for precious metals. Sometimes it is. This time it was not, which is a decent argument for holding your reflexes loosely. I made a related point about not rearranging a plan around every headline in Geopolitics Will Keep Making Noise.
The weak American jobs figures a few days ago pushed in the same direction, trimming the odds of a rate rise next month and giving metals another shove upward.
The bit nobody tells you
Here is what I actually want to say, and it is not really about silver.
A chart showing a fall and a recovery takes about a second to look at. Living through it takes months. Every one of those months contains a morning when you open an app, and the number is worse, an evening when somebody explains with total confidence why it is going to zero, and a quiet hour when you seriously consider selling simply to make the feeling stop.
Nothing in the analysis prepares you for that. Analysis tells you what an asset is and how it behaves. It does not tell you how you behave. The second question determines your actual returns, which is why the professionals themselves eventually conceded that behaviour, rather than information, is the real obstacle.
My own error was not the position. It was the app. I stopped looking because looking hurt, and the moment I stopped looking I was no longer making decisions, I was hoping. Those are different activities, and only one of them is investing.
What I do now
I decide what a holding is for before I own it, and I write it down in a sentence a sensible person could read back to me. If it is there for a decade, then a bad six months is information about the six months and not about the decade. If I cannot write the sentence, I have not thought it through, and I do not buy it.
That is not advice, and I am not suggesting anyone should own silver, gold or anything else. Volatility of this size is not for everyone, and there is no shame whatsoever in deciding it is not for you.
But if you do hold something that swings, decide now, while things are calm, what you will do when it halves. Because you will not choose well in the moment; no one does.
The Jacqueline Brand — knowledge builds confidence, confidence builds wealth. This is editorial commentary for inspiration, not financial or professional advice. Always do your own research. The Collection
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