Having successfully ‘attacked’ the GameStop stock, which has posted triple-digit rises in the last few sessions, retail (and other) investors appear to have moved on to silver, which had already greatly outperformed gold over the past week.
Silver is skyrocketing today, jumping by over 10% in a matter of hours to reach its highest in 8 years while gold is up a meagre 1%. Moving silver, however, is not the same as moving GameStop. There are in fact many markets linked to silver, including the physical market, futures, ETFs, CFDs and many other derivatives of the precious metal. The overall trading volumes are also different.
Fear, however, is pushing many of the traders who have shorts on silver to start covering their positions. Sellers of the physical metal are also rushing to cover their short positions, to avoid finding themselves at a loss in the face of the startling increases.
We must also stress, however, that a successful attack on the commodity sector could trigger an intervention by central banks in the medium term to avoid dangerous inflationary spirals.
Silver has gained about 20% in less than 4 days, a huge increase in the world of commodities, that would generally take months or even years to achieve and would be mostly motivated by fundamentals rather than pure speculation.
