The break was fast, the pain came from waiting
Silver took out its $64 low from early February and fell to around $61. Gold took out its $4,400 low from early February and dropped to $4,100. Both then rallied again. In January the call was $300 to $500 silver; now the price sits near $60.
Here is what actually happened. A correction was expected in the middle of the run-up, likely a sharp scare, probably in March or April, followed by more upside. It came sooner and cut deeper. On a simple weekly chart, more than 90% of the damage happened in the first handful of days. The collapse started January 30, carried through the February 3 open into a low in the first week of February. Gold hit 4,400 and silver hit about 63.90.
Six months later, in early August, silver trades several dollars below its early-February level and gold trades about 8% below where it was then. So the real decline was a matter of hours across a few trading days. Everything since has been a slow grind that wears people out. Every new low since February has been marginal and fails to hold, running the obvious stops without follow-through. The rallies also fail to hold. What has broken investor psychology is time and failed rallies, not price.
The people hurt worst are the latecomers who chased the trend and bought at the wrong point. Entry matters. MSA gave three buy signals over recent years: $25 silver in March 2025, $35 silver in June 2025, and $56 silver at November's close of 2025. Those were the entry points, not $100 or $110.
Comparing this to old peaks is a trap
Too many people look back at prior silver and gold highs on an arithmetic scale and assume we face the same two-year slog that followed those peaks. That assumption is wrong.
The global monetary situation sits at the point of a nuclear event. The metals are cheap and going far higher. Gold's current gain is only about half of what it produced in its 1980 and 2011 bull markets, both of which were eightfold gains. Gold is only about four-fold above its bear-market low near $1,050 set in 2015.
A chart run last month showed lead, steel, zinc, aluminum, copper, and gold back to 1980. Each of those metals now trades about four times higher than its 1980 level. Gold's 1980 high was 850; at 4,100 it is more than four-fold, almost five-fold higher. So why does silver trade only about $10 above its $50 high from 1980? All these metals peaked around the same time, yet most are four-fold higher and silver is barely above where it was. That gap should smack investors in the face.
Eric Sprott and many others argue silver has been manipulated and restrained. There have been a few court cases. The valuation gap is hard to explain with normal commodity analysis, and it points to a price held too low for too long.
Too low for too long means an explosion
When markets make mistakes, they overreact the other way to fix the error. A price too high for too long collapses. A price too low for too long explodes. Silver is still in that process. The move to $300 to $500 will happen once the price breaks up out of this congestion. On the day of this interview, silver and gold were crossing numbers that signal this rally will be different from the failed rallies inside the range. If price clears the congestion, silver goes berserk.
The fundamental headlines are noise
The January run-up came with real events: a bottleneck moving bullion from London to the COMEX, the war with Iran, and the CME raising margin requirements. These get ignored because they are transient.
The popular belief that gold and monetary metals benefit from global uncertainty is false. When the Ukraine-Russia war began in late February 2022, nearly all commodities, including gold, peaked within a week or two of that event and fell until later that year. The same happened with the Iran situation. On the first trading day of March, the first session after that war began, gold and silver dropped into late March, a cleansing drop that took out the February low. That is the opposite of the "war lifts gold" story.
Open interest, commitment of traders, and similar popular indicators come and go, and many send false signals. The real driver is the ongoing decay in the value of money: the dollar, euro, yen, and pound all lose buying power year by year and decade by decade. When your grandfather built a house it cost $4,500. Your father's cost $45,000. The median home now costs $450,000. Gold reflects that decay because gold is money and has been for 3,000 years. Silver is junior gold and moves with it, sometimes more, sometimes less.
The crisis in fiat currencies is about to hit a head. This is not about the dollar falling against the euro or yen on the dollar index; that will happen and hardly matters. The real event is the realization that government paper and debt are not a safe place to hide during bad events in the world.
Momentum: nothing important actually broke
The key tool is momentum, measured as price against its own longer-term average and plotted as an oscillator. Measured against the three-year average, gold and silver had sharp drops in January and February over three or four trading days, but nothing structural broke. There was no uptrend line and no flat floor to break. A sharp momentum move with no structure broken is a break inside an ongoing positive pattern of up-and-down zigzags that still trend up.
Contrast that with 2011. Gold hit 1,920 in September 2011, dropped about $100 and bounced. A top was flagged in December 2011 using annual momentum, which broke a seven-point uptrend line, a multi-year structure any child with a crayon could draw. That structure never showed on the price chart, only on momentum. Gold peaked in 2011, never returned to that high, and finally collapsed in spring 2013, then labored lower through 2013, 2014, and 2015.
The 2015 low worked the same way in reverse. Price kept making descending lows and lower highs through 2013 to 2015, but momentum built a floor under a flat multi-year ceiling. Price said downtrend; momentum said base-building. Gold broke out in February 2016 at about $1,140, and the stance has been bullish since.
The recent break only damaged short-term momentum: the 10-week moving average, the 50-day average, and the three-week moving average all broke. The long-term trend never broke. So the question is not whether the long-term trend reasserts itself, because it was never broken. The question is whether the intermediate momentum that went negative turns back up. As of the interview, silver and gold were breaking above the levels that define an upturn in intermediate momentum, with the weekly close still to confirm over a couple of days.
What happens next
This rally should hold above the recent lows and move up, and unlike the failed rallies of the past six months, it should push through the prior highs. At the point where price clears those highs, sentiment flips. Latecomers who sold say they were wrong and that they missed it. Then the news stories arrive: a credit problem here, a bond market dropping five points there. That is the accelerated phase. That is when silver joins the other metals and gold, moving four-fold or five-fold above its 1980 high, despite every attempt to restrain it.
