Silver · Silver (commodity)

Silver rides the same wave as gold, and he "wouldn't be surprised to see 80 or 90" by year-end. It tends to move more sharply than gold when investors pile in.

The catch is how cheaply silver can be supplied. About three-quarters of it comes out as a byproduct: miners dig for copper, lead, zinc or gold, and the silver that comes along costs "$5 an ounce or less" to recover. Even dedicated silver mines average under $20. On top of that, old jewelry and silverware get melted down and investors take profits, so metal flows back into the market when prices are high.

So he is bullish for the next few months but thinks the physics of supply will eventually pull prices down once investors calm down. "$3,000 silver" is not happening on a lasting basis.

Silver is mostly an industrial metal (electronics, cars, appliances), but about 30% is bought as money, so it gets dragged along when gold rises — and because it's a smaller, jumpier market it tends to move further. He personally saves in silver rather than gold, expecting about double gold's return, while warning it can swing wildly.

He prices silver as a percentage of the gold price: roughly 2% at the low end, 3% as a fair target and 4% at the high end. At $8,000 gold that means about $160–480, with $200–250 his working target.

Silver sits in what he calls the "performance gold" bucket — the higher-risk, higher-reward 10% of the portfolio you have to trade actively rather than buy and forget.

His most useful signal is the gold-to-silver ratio — how many ounces of silver one ounce of gold buys. When a big gold bull market ends, silver has historically run so hard that the ratio collapses to 15–20. It hasn't done that yet. Silver has beaten gold a bit, but nothing like the blow-off you see at a real top — which is one of his two main reasons for saying this is still a bull market and not yet a bubble.

Silver appears here mainly as a track record rather than an argument: a silver position added to the Founders+ portfolio in July 2025 has risen as much as 240%, and that result is the stated reason she went back to the same mining jurisdiction to look for copper. It is worth noting what she is really claiming — that the location, not just the metal, was the edge.

The substantive silver case for the month is on the previous day's page: the world has consumed more silver than it mines for five straight years, by over 100 million ounces a year, because solar panels, electronics and defense keep using it up.

Silver fell with gold after the speech, to about $67, and her case for it is even less about interest rates because silver is only half a monetary metal — the other half is an industrial input that gets consumed and not recovered.

The number that matters: the world has used more silver than it has mined for five years running, by more than 100 million ounces a year. Solar panels, electronics and defense manufacturing keep eating into it, and mine supply cannot keep up — most silver is a by-product of mining other metals, so producers cannot simply turn the tap. A deficit that persistent draws down above-ground stockpiles year after year, and no rate decision refills them.

The other buyer she points to is physical, not financial: households in places like Shanghai and Mumbai buying actual coins and bars. That person is not checking the Fed funds rate before deciding to save in metal. So when futures traders knock the paper price down on a hawkish headline, the demand that actually removes silver from the market is unaffected — which is why she treats the drop as a headline event rather than a change in the case.

Silver is unusual among precious metals: about half of it gets used up in industry rather than stored in vaults. It conducts electricity better than anything else that is affordable, so it ends up in solar panels, EV batteries, and every electrical contact inside a machine.

McCracken's argument is that the market is pricing silver as a monetary metal that happens to have industrial uses, and has not yet done the arithmetic on robots. His unit of measurement is blunt: roughly an ounce of silver per Tesla Optimus humanoid. If you take Musk's stated ambition of one in every household on the planet even half-seriously, the ounces required run into the hundreds of millions per year against an annual mine supply of well under a billion. He thinks the recent price inflection is the market beginning to sense this — "I think actually it's front running robotics."

The practical part is how he expresses it. He puts a number on the metal — "$100 is about to be the floor price" — but immediately caps the upside: "it may not go much higher. It might go there and sit there." A metal that goes to a level and parks there is a poor place for new bullion, so he is not buying physical (what he holds is old stock from $40–50, kept as an emergency fund). Instead he wants miners: if silver settles at $100 and a miner's cost of production is, say, $20, the profit per ounce multiplies far faster than the metal price does. That is operating leverage, and it is the reason to own the company rather than the commodity when you expect a price step-change followed by a plateau.

Silver usually trails gold. He uses a rough rule that an ounce of gold buys about 50 ounces of silver, so if gold reaches $8,000, silver would be around $150–200. The spike above $100 earlier this year was driven by short-term traders who then sold; he expects the next rise to be steadier and to hold.

Silver is his higher-octane version of the gold trade — it's both a precious metal and an industrial one, so it tends to lag gold and then move much harder when the move finally comes. "I bet silver is probably the one that's going to rip in this next spike," and by his read the move is only 7–8% old, so "right now is the time to go into silver."

His upside talk is deliberately extreme ("silver could go to 300 or something ridiculous like that" against roughly 63–64 today) — treat it as a statement of which direction he thinks the risk sits, not a forecast. This is also his rotation logic in action: the bottleneck has moved from crude to refined products to copper and now, he thinks, to precious metals.

Silver spiked to about $121 an ounce in January and then fell by roughly half. Neumeier's argument is that a 50% drop is not evidence the bull market is over — it's what the middle of a long bull market looks like. His reference point is 2006: halfway through the 2002–2012 run, prices dropped hard and everyone declared it finished, and he hears "the same kind of chatter today." He also notes that on a 30-year seasonal chart, metals routinely make their lows in June and July, which is exactly when this drop happened.

He separates why prices moved in the two cycles. The 2011 run to $50 was a paper move — driven by traders using futures and leverage rather than anyone taking delivery of metal. Paper moves go "parabolic" (a near-vertical price line), and his rule is that they always overshoot in both directions, so the crash back is as exaggerated as the spike. The last six months, by contrast, he calls a physical market: real buyers taking real metal, visible in banks raising margin requirements and in his own company receiving a margin call. That distinction matters because paper demand can evaporate overnight; industrial and physical demand can't.

And that demand, he says, hasn't flinched with the price: "demand at $120 is exactly the same as it is today." Silver has been designated a critical metal, and it goes into nuclear energy, AI hardware, robotics and effectively every electronic device — with no practical substitute at the same performance. If the metal is a necessity rather than a discretionary purchase, buyers keep buying through a price drop, and the drop tells you about positioning rather than about the underlying market.

The whole report doubles as a lesson in why silver is genuinely scarce: getting it out of remote mountain rock takes roads, power, skilled people, capital and years of work — none of which a trader's screen price reflects. Prins's takeaway is that the real silver market is much tighter than the paper price suggests, which is exactly why she likes owning a low-cost producer like Aya rather than just the metal on a chart.

Silver gets the same boost as gold from a weaker dollar, plus an extra kicker: as Japan's central bank finally raises rates, traders who borrowed cheap yen to invest elsewhere have to unwind those bets, and that money tends to flow into hard assets like silver rather than back into dollars. Prins's 2026 target for silver is $120, and like gold she views the current pullback as a buying opportunity.

Silver's price on traders' screens has fallen about 35% this year, but Prins argues that's just paper trading reacting to war and inflation headlines — it doesn't create or destroy a single real ounce. Underneath, the world keeps using more silver than it digs up (six straight years of shortfalls), driven by solar panels, EVs, and AI data centers. Because most silver comes out of the ground as a leftover of copper and zinc mining, miners can't just dig more silver when prices rise. She sees the dip as a buying opportunity in a long-term shortage.

After its crash, silver has stabilized around $70 and Prins thinks it's quietly being bought back up ("accumulation"). She's watching the $66 line — as long as silver stays above it, the case for a big rebound toward $110+ holds, driven by booming demand for solar panels and chips that outpaces how fast it can be mined.

Silver crashed about 40% from its January record, and the headlines blame the war. Prins says that's the wrong read: the drop was caused by temporary money-market forces — a stronger dollar, higher interest rates, and forced selling by leveraged traders — not by anything changing in how much silver is actually being dug up or used.

In fact, the war makes silver's long-term story stronger, because expensive oil pushes governments to build more solar power and electric grids, and solar is the single biggest industrial use of silver. Meanwhile China is quietly hoarding silver at record speed and tightening its grip on exports. The world has been running short of silver for six straight years, and new mines take 8-12 years to build. So Prins treats the selloff — especially in beaten-down silver mining stocks — as a buying opportunity rather than a warning sign.

Silver is the more dramatic cousin of gold — it swings harder in both directions, and it's currently down more than a third from its January peak. Prins expects it to follow the same script as gold: a sharp pullback now, then a much bigger recovery as the structural story (industrial demand, supply deficits, a softer dollar) reasserts itself. Her 2026 target is $120.

Silver had an even wilder ride — down over 30% in one day, then up 9% back to about $84. Prins highlights that throughout the chaos, buyers in China kept paying a hefty premium to get actual silver bars, showing the real-world demand is strong. Her recommended company covers both gold and silver, but you need to be a Founders+ member to see which one it is.

This post is just Prins sharing someone else's interview — analyst David Morgan on a Money Metals podcast. His message: silver's chart looks like it's spiking straight up, but don't assume it's just excited small investors piling in. Interestingly, lots of people who own physical silver have been selling into the rally, which suggests the big, steady buyers are larger strategic players. His warning is that even if you're right that silver goes higher over time, the ride can be brutal — prices can swing wildly and shake you out if you're using leverage or get nervous.

Silver fell 36% in a single session — its worst day since 1980 — after running up 57% in January on a lot of borrowed-money bets. Prins sees that as healthy: the reckless bets got wiped out, leaving a cleaner setup. Meanwhile real-world demand never blinked — China is paying big premiums to get physical silver bars. With a long-running supply shortage still in place, she frames the plunge as a buying opportunity rather than a warning sign.

Like gold, silver is one of the metals antimony is typically found with, and it recently broke above $100 an ounce. Those strong silver prices add to the economics of the gold-silver-antimony projects the Pentagon is hunting for — the precious metals pay the bills while the antimony provides the strategic, defense-funded upside.

Silver has nearly doubled since late October to around $90. Critics call that a bubble; Prins disagrees — she says it's a logical reaction to an unstable dollar, money-printing and global turmoil, the same forces lifting gold. In short, she sees silver's surge as rational, not speculative froth.

Silver is in a years-long shortage: the world uses more than it digs up, and demand from solar panels, electronics and power grids keeps climbing. The catch is that most silver isn't mined on its own — it comes out as a leftover when companies mine copper, lead and zinc. So even if silver gets expensive, miners can't just go dig more of it; they'd have to mine more copper first. That trapped supply, plus China tightening exports, is why Prins thinks prices keep heading up and the best-positioned silver miners benefit most.