In this illustrated photo, silver bars are on display at Polyak Precious Metals in San Francisco on January 14, 2006.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Individual investors are betting big on big price movements in silver.
The question is which direction will precious metals go?
Retail investors sent a net amount of about $171 million to the United States on Monday. iShares Silver Trust (SLV)It’s a popular exchange-traded fund that tracks the metal, according to market research firm Vandertrack. This was the largest single-day inflow of new money into the trust, and nearly double the previous peak recorded during the 2021 “silver squeeze.”
“Silver has just become retailers’ new (favorite) toy,” Vanda analyst Ashwin Bakre wrote on Tuesday.
Monday’s surge came as Silver Trust rose nearly 6%, pushing its 2026 rally to more than 52% and extending last year’s nearly 145% rally.
SLV ETF, year-to-date
Last week, silver topped $100 an ounce for the first time.
Bakre said silver outperformed tech stocks and became the epicenter of the retail fever.
famous tech stocks etc. Nvidia, tesla and Palantir Vanda said it was one of the most purchased individual names by independent traders in 2025.
But silver is currently an even hotter trade than Nvidia, which has been hailed as a beneficiary of the artificial intelligence that has captivated Wall Street since late 2022. The momentum of silver trading volume, which measures the acceleration of trading, jumped to 11.55 times the normal rate, exceeding Nvidia’s 7.54 times.
As a result, “relatively speaking, the ‘tracking’ of silver has become more intense than in classical AI trading,” Bakre said.
The increased interest in silver, once known as the poor man’s gold, is creating a “halo effect” on mining stocks, Bakre said. hecla mine and cool mining Vanda data shows new cash flows have surged to more than double the normal pace. Hecla and Cool’s stock prices have soared nearly 40% since the new year.
But Bakre said investors are waging a “two-front war” on silver.
On the bearish side, Vanda found that the inflow ratio into the market was unusually high. ProShares Ultra Short Silver (ZSL)Bakre said, indicating that many retail investors are making leveraged bets that prices will collapse.
Still, it appears retail investors are no longer just looking to push down precious metal prices, Bakre said. Instead, the group is “structurally repositioning” to be exposed to longer hard asset cycles.
Others are questionable.
Tom Sosnoff, founder of LossDog, said that silver’s price movements in less than a month are comparable to those that typically occur over several years, and called this movement a “meme stock trade” due to both the spike in trading volume and the high volatility.
Sosnoff told CNBC’s “Worldwide Exchange” that gold and silver are “definitely kind of the meme products of 2026.” “Silver’s move was wild.”
He added: “This deal was incredible, but very one-sided.” “I think they took a lot of hostages on the way up, because the trade route is short.”
