is having a great summer, just clocking out June with one of its best performances of modern times. Silver’s breakout surge and silver-ETF-share demand are far outpacing gold’s. Such strong upside action in this seasonally-weak time of the year reveals something is afoot. Apparently robust demand has arisen outside of usual primary-silver-driver channels. Silver has rarely been so interesting in this mid-summer timeframe.
After spending long years mostly drifting sideways, silver had fallen off the radars of even most contrarians. That includes me, following decades of studying and analyzing it. There was so little interest out there for silver that I stopped writing essays on it. Then several weeks ago, I penned my first silver one in fully 3.7 years on silver’s shaky breakout. Silver had just broken out to a 13.3-year secular high on silver-futures buying!
While it was great to see silver surging and starting to restore trader awareness, there was a serious downside risk. Speculators’ silver-futures long contracts were on the higher side of their trading range during this mighty cyclical gold bull since early October 2023. Total spec longs in early June were 69% up into that, compared to just 25% for ! So leveraged silver-futures specs had way more room to sell than buy.
Silver is often slaved to gold, acting like a sentiment gauge for the yellow metal. So if gold suffered any kind of material selloff, it would probably suck in silver. Then specs’ silver-futures longs grew even more exhausted, surging to 88% up into their gold-bull trading range in mid-June! That was on the way to tripling specs’ gold-futures longs at 34%. Silver really looked to be on the cusp of a big-and-fast selloff if gold fell.
And it did, losing a sizable 4.6% in just under two weeks into the end of June. Prior to that, I would’ve bet silver’s parallel decline would’ve roughly doubled gold’s. But amazingly silver way outperformed even in that latest-gold-pullback span, retreating merely 1.0%! And that was part of a phenomenal June for the forgotten white metal, which surged a massive 9.4% last month! That obliterated gold’s tiny 0.4% gain.
The leading SLV silver ETF saw enough differential share buying from American stock investors to fuel a larger 3.7% silver-bullion-holdings build in June. That was considerably better than the dominant GLD (NYSE:) and IAU gold ETFs’ +2.4% last month. Silver has defied the odds to achieve one of its best Junes on record! This silver-summer-seasonals chart really drives home silver’s outperformance compared to precedent.
The methodology here is the same applied to gold and gold stocks in my latest summer-doldrums essay back at the end of May. All silver summers during modern-gold-bull years are indexed to their final May closes, which are set to 100. Then silver’s price action is recast off that in perfectly-comparable percentage terms relative to May closes. This year’s action is shown in dark-blue, with prior years’ averaged in red.
Right out of the summer gates on June 2nd, silver blasted 5.6% higher on a parallel 2.7% gold surge! That was the Monday after a big-news weekend. Later Friday evening Trump told steelworkers at a speech that he planned to double steel and aluminum tariffs from 25% to 50%. Then Sunday Ukraine used drones to reportedly destroy or disable a third of Russia’s entire strategic-bomber fleet far behind frontlines.
So gold benefited from both resurgent-trade-war fears and geopolitical fears over Russia’s inevitable military response. But silver’s outperformance that day was unusual in recent context. For example on April 21st gold soared 3.0% after Trump’s top economist told reporters the president was exploring ways to fire the Fed chair. Yet silver merely climbed 0.5% that day, lost in its own world totally ignoring gold’s strength.
On June 13th the day after Israel attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities, gold rallied 1.3% on geopolitical fears soaring. Silver not only didn’t respond, but drifted 0.2% lower! So something exceptional happened on June’s first trading day. Speculators buying silver-futures longs played a role, as those shot up a larger 10.9k contracts in the Commitments-of-Traders week straddling that. But SLV’s holdings only edged up 0.3%.
And silver not only held those big gains, but soon doubled them in early June. As the dark-blue line on this chart shows, that was silver’s best summer start since at least 2001! Silver drifting sideways after that to consolidate its big gains was a nice show of strength. That left last month’s huge 9.4% surge the second-best June of modern times, only eclipsed by silver rocketing higher in late June 2016 nearly a decade ago.
Silver’s relative strength last month is overcoming my skepticism several weeks ago. The infamous pro-big-government economist John Maynard Keynes is credited with saying during a debate “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” Silver’s outperformance is winning more converts. On June 17th as gold drifted flatlined, silver surged another 2.2% to a fresh 13.7-year secular high over $37!
So something different is afoot here, and I’d love to know what. Specs’ silver-futures longs remain high and stretched, 79% up into their cyclical-gold-bull trading range per the latest weekly report. These guys have neither done much selling nor buying for the great majority of June. The former is likely part of the reason silver has consolidated high in recent weeks instead of selling off. The futures specs are quite-bullish.
Silver’s great summer so far reminds me of gold action during much of its mighty 88.6% cyclical bull from early October 2023 to mid-June 2025 so far. There were plenty of times in 2024 when gold was surging without sufficient spec gold-futures-long buying or capital inflows into gold ETFs from American stock investors. Since those had been gold’s two dominant primary drivers for many years, that was very striking.
That made gold’s 40%+ monster upleg more challenging to analyze. If the demand driving gold higher wasn’t coming from gold-futures and gold-ETF-share buying, what was its source? Thankfully the World Gold Council publishes outstanding quarterly reports detailing gold’s supply-and-demand fundamentals on a global basis. Those reports illuminated outsized gold buying from central banks and Chinese investors.
Them taking the gold-driving baton from the usual suspects made 2024 a remarkable year for gold. With that gold revelation of major demand shifts, I wonder if silver is starting to experience something similar. Unfortunately world silver markets are way more opaque and much harder to research than gold’s. Comprehensive global silver fundamental data is only published once a year by the Silver Institute.
Those excellent reports are released around late April, covering the preceding calendar year. And 2024’s data is too stale to illuminate what happened with world silver demand in June 2025. Last year silver wasn’t outperforming, quite the contrary. While gold blasted 27.2% higher in 2024, silver lagged with a 21.5% full-year gain. The SLV-holdings build in all of last year weighed in at just 5.7%, truly nothing special.
I read the Silver Institute’s latest World Silver Survey when it came out, then combed through it again this week to try and find clues to what’s happening in silver. Central banks certainly aren’t stockpiling silver, so physical investment demand in major countries is where to look. But silver is still mostly an industrial metal. In 2024 total silver bar-and-coin demand and silver-ETF bullion buying weighed in at 22% of total demand.
Industrial demand dwarfed that at 58%, but investment demand is far more volatile and variable and thus better able to move silver prices at the margin. We can test that a bit with silver’s best and worst years in the last decade. In 2020 silver skyrocketed 47.8%, then in 2021 it fell 11.7%! SLV silver-bullion holdings soared 54.1% in 2020, then fell 5.0% in 2021. Total global silver investment demand also fell from 2020 to 2021.
According to that latest World Silver Survey, bar-and-coin and silver-ETF bullion buying totaled a massive 539.2m ounces in 2020! That was the most in this last decade by far. Then in 2021 that plunged 35.2% to 349.2m ounces. But last year when silver again rallied 21.5%, that totaled just 252.5m ounces. There’s some correlation between WSS-reported silver investment and silver price performance across calendar years.
Those annual WSSs also divide out physical silver investment by countries. The US led the world last year at 64.9m ounces, but that still collapsed 46.3% YoY. India came in at number two with 59.8m ounces, which was the only major country seeing growth up 21.3% YoY! China was way down at sixth with physical investment demand of just 5.5m ounces in 2024, which fell 11.3% YoY. That’s all interesting.
Central banks aren’t buying silver, and neither were Chinese investors last year at least according to the Silver Institute. That doesn’t mean Chinese investors haven’t been buying this year particularly recently. I’ll be on the lookout for anecdotal reports of outsized Chinese silver demand, which I haven’t yet seen. There have been tons on massive Chinese gold demand, particularly in April 2025 after Trump’s huge tariffs.
The Indian angle is really intriguing. Indians have long had a deep cultural affinity for gold, leading the world’s buying for decades until China usurped India back in 2012. Gold’s strong autumn-rally seasonals have long been largely driven by Indian harvest buying followed by Indian-wedding-season jewelry buying. Indians are shrewd price-sensitive gold investors, preferring to buy it relatively-low rather than near highs.
But gold has been anything but low recently, stuck in a high consolidation near all-time highs since mid-April now. While Indian seasonal buying doesn’t really start ramping until mid-July or so, I wonder if sky-high gold prices are helping silver’s star rise in India. Silver will never replace gold for Indian brides’ jewelry, but it could make inroads as a way-cheaper alternative precious-metals investment for poorer Indians.
The same could be happening in China, extremely-high gold prices boosting silver investment as a more-affordable alternative. Again these are just ideas, but perhaps anecdotal reports out of those countries will bolster or undermine them. What we do know is there has to be a demand cause behind silver’s great June price action. Such drivers of unexplained strength generally become apparent sooner or later.
Keeping our ears to the rails ought to offer some clues in coming weeks if silver resumes rallying. But no matter the drivers behind silver’s strength, if it continues investors will increasingly chase silver amplifying its gains. Silver is famous historically for rocketing parabolic in phenomenal spikes when traders crowd in. There’s lots of room for this powerful self-reinforcing dynamic to manifest again, potentially in coming months.
That American SLV iShares Silver Trust (NYSE:) is the world’s largest physically-backed silver ETF by far, with 478.0m ounces of holdings this week. Exiting 2024 according to the WSS, SLV alone commanded 44.5% of all the silver held by all the world’s physically-backed silver ETFs! Ranking second at 17.4% was the PSLV Sprott Physical Silver Trust ETF, another American one. Indian silver ETFs were way down at just 3.7%.
Nevertheless, the WSS analysts highlighted soaring Indian-silver-ETF bullion holdings. The first Indian silver ETF was launched in January 2022, an eternity after SLV’s April 2006 birth in the US. Last year Indian-silver-ETF holdings almost tripled to 38.6m ounces exiting 2024! That’s still small, yet a big trend. The WSS said that total inflows into silver ETFs last year were the equivalent of 42% of India’s retail investment.
Circling back to SLV, its holdings ran 459.9m ounces exiting May just before silver’s early-June surge. As of this Tuesday they’ve climbed 4.0% to 478.0m. That shows that American stock investors are certainly getting interested in silver’s breakout surge and exceptional early-summer strength. And they have vast room to buy if silver keeps running, which could easily overpower and nullify any potential silver-futures selling.
SLV holdings’ all-time high came way back in early February 2021, 677.3m ounces which is a whopping 41.7% higher than current levels! And back then silver was trading near $26.50, not terribly far from the $36.00 today. Considered another way, this Tuesday SLV’s total holdings were only worth $17.2b. Relative to the massive US markets, that’s pocket change. So there’s vast room to flood into silver-ETF shares.
For comparison, the total value of gold bullion held by the dominant American GLD, IAU, and GLDM gold ETFs is worth $165.1b. Heck if silver continues greatly outperforming gold, some of that gold investment could shift into silver. But silver’s biggest upside potential arises if strong ongoing gains during coming months attract in non-traditional silver investors who flood into silver-ETF shares to chase its momentum.
The more SLV shares they buy, the more this ETF’s managers have to shunt any excess demand into underlying physical silver bullion. The more bullion SLV buys, the faster silver prices rise. The faster silver rallies, the more the financial media reports on it increasing traders’ awareness. And the more they follow silver, the more capital they will deploy to chase it accelerating its gains. This is a powerful virtuous circle!
Silver’s outsized June upside far outperforming gold is getting me excited about silver again for the first time in years. And increasing numbers of speculators and investors are taking note of silver’s great summer so far. The longer and higher silver rallies on balance, the more attractive deploying capital in silver and its miners’ stocks becomes. Gold breaking out of its high consolidation soon would really help.
In last week’s essay, I wrote about gold miners stacking records. They are on the verge of reporting their best quarterly results ever by far, with dazzling record revenues, bottom-line earnings, unit profits, and operating cashflows!
The silver stocks are looking really attractive too given silver’s massive outperformance of gold in June. While there aren’t many dedicated primary silver miners left, plenty of smaller gold miners have significant silver byproducts. Some were past major silver producers that have transitioned into being primary gold ones over this past decade. Many stocks materially-silver-related have big upside potential if silver keeps rallying.
The bottom line is silver is having a great summer. Silver just blasted higher to its strongest early-June action of at least this past quarter-century, and its second-best June performance. That is increasingly turning traders’ heads, and interest is often followed by capital inflows to chase upside momentum which accelerates it. Investors have vast room to flood into silver-ETF shares, which would drive silver way higher.
Silver’s outperformance of gold is even more intriguing since silver’s usual-suspect drivers can’t explain it. Neither speculators’ silver-futures buying nor American stock investors’ SLV-share buying have been sufficient to fuel such a strong June. That implies that global silver investment demand is really picking up elsewhere, with India being a leading candidate. It will sure be interesting to see how this all plays out.