Silver’s dazzling parabolic surge this summer was overwhelmingly driven by enormous silver-ETF-share buying. Led by momentum-chasing millennial traders, unprecedentedly-huge amounts of stock-market capital deluged into the dominant SLV iShares Silver Trust silver ETF. But since silver’s resulting lofty peak, silver-ETF-share selling has been mounting. An acceleration is a major downside risk for silver prices.
Silver has certainly lived up to its wildly-volatile reputation this year. Ahead of mid-March’s brutal stock panic driven by governments’ heavy-handed national lockdowns to slow the spread of COVID-19, silver was inconspicuously grinding higher. In late February before pandemic fears flared in the US, silver was running $18.62. But it was then soon sucked into the epic maelstrom of fear as stock markets cratered.