How silver market has morphed into meme trading
A seller shows various models and weights of silver bullion at a gold jewelry manufacturer in “El Sagha” as gold prices surge following the depreciation of the local currency at the gold market in Cairo, Egypt, on January 14, 2024.
Amr Abdullah Dalş | Reuters
Silver’s meteoric rise and equally dramatic reversal in recent weeks has led market watchers to ask a fundamental question: When does an asset stop trading at a fundamental level and start acting like a meme?
The volatility in silver prices has led to increased comparisons to meme stocks like GameStop, the video game retailer that became a global phenomenon in 2021 after retail traders on Reddit piled on en masse, sending its shares soaring far beyond what traditional valuation models would justify.
breast stocks It is typically characterized by a few fundamental features: sharp, often parabolic price movements, heavy participation from retail investors, and narratives that go viral on social media, sometimes downright underwhelming fundamentals. Liquidity can come in quickly and often go out just as quickly.
Michael Antonelli, market strategist at Bull and Baird, made the X-related comparison clear: “How is silver different from GameStop?” he asked in a post last week. “Isn’t this a meme now?”
He told CNBC that the metal has reached a sort of “zeitgeist” with retail traders starting to move in droves. While silver has industrial and consumer uses, prices generally don’t move more than 100% in three months: “It’s completely disconnected and trending vertically relative to retail flows,” he said.
Retail investors poured a net $171 million into the iShares Silver Trust, a popular exchange-traded fund that tracks the metal, on Jan. 26, according to the latest market research firm VandaTrack. This was nearly double the previous peak recorded during the “silver squeeze” in 2021.
Spot silver prices rose nearly 4% to $4,852.76 an ounce on Tuesday, while silver futures in New York rose more than 9% to $84 an ounce.
In the last month, silver has recorded 10 moves of 5% or more in both directions.
“Silver has become the new trend in retail [favorite] toy,” Vanda analyst Ashwin Bhakre said.
This enthusiasm is visible on Reddit. The platform played a central role in the original meme stock phenomenon, with topics like WallStreetBets helping coordinate retail buying in GameStop in 2021.
On the Reddit Silverbugs forum, a community where users document physical purchases, discuss price targets, and share memes, posts tracking recent sales are emblematic of meme stock culture.
Silver prices last month
“I bought the Dip today! DIAMOND HANDS,” wrote Reddit user Jstaakz. After Friday’s sell-off. “Diamond hands” is a meme-share term used by retail traders to indicate that they plan to hold an asset despite sharp losses or extreme volatility, often as a show of faith or defiance against selling pressure.
Another user He asked traders for advice on Monday Stating that they decided whether they should keep their silver or sell it, Trump added that silver was purchased for $ 48 per ounce last June.
A self-fulfilling madness
For some analysts, silver’s behavior has crossed a familiar and dangerous threshold.
StoneX’s head of Market Intelligence, Rhona O’Connell, warned that prices were breaking away from sustainable levels.
“Silver was overvalued and in a self-fulfilling frenzy, but it is known to be unstable and its history is replete with examples of price collapses,” he said. “It’s acting like Icarus at the moment, and to extend the analogy, there’s a strong risk that other buyers will get burned.”
Tom Sosnoff, CEO of financial technology platform Lossdog, even included gold in the meme fold: “Gold and silver have definitely become the meme commodity of 2026… the silver move has been crazy… We’re basically seeing a multi-year move in less than 30 days.”
“Big volume, big volatility, not a lot of logic or reason. I mean, you can make up as many fundamental or technical reasons as you want, but it’s a meme exchange,” Sosnoff said.
He warned that new participants are influenced by headlines and social media. “If you’ve never traded silver in the futures market or the ETF market before, be careful. These are large contracts and they’re flying around and moving at levels we’ve never seen before.”
Henrietta Treyz, managing partner of Veda Partners, said the dynamic is unmistakable. “Movements in precious metals, whether it’s gold or silver, are really significant. And as an outside observer, you can tell that the meme stock component is pretty much alive and well,” he said. “It reminds me of GameStop.”
But not everyone agrees that silver should be lumped in with purely narrative assets.
Vasu Menon, OCBC’s managing director of investment strategy, said silver “sometimes behaves like a commodity, but inherently it doesn’t,” pointing to industrial demand from solar panels, electric vehicles and electronics. However, Menon acknowledged that speculation had amplified the recent moves and sharp corrections were part of silver’s DNA.
