Why Silver is Nowhere Near Finished

Well, today is Friday, January 23rd. Markets have just opened and as I speak, the price of silver is $99.90, almost $100 an ounce. It's probably going to get there today. It might even get there during the course of this video. And gold looking pretty stellar at $49.43 might hit $5,000 an ounce today. So two very impressive milestones. And in this video, I want to explain why some people outside the precious metals space looking in, think that we're already in a blow off top and we're destined for a reversal. Whereas those of us who are experienced precious metals holders know that you ain't seen nothing yet. Now, as a starting point, I want to use this tweet here, because I think it kind of represents a lot of the sentiment going on in the traditional finance space. This comes from Rajat Soni, CFA. And ordinarily he puts out a lot of good stuff. Here, I think he might be missing the mark a little bit. He quotes influencers in general. Silver's bull run hasn't even started yet while silver is in the middle of a blow off top. You can't make this up. The people who didn't buy at $20 are now buying at $93 expecting silver to go to $500 an ounce by end of year 2026. Investor psychology is wild. Okay. So nothing against him. Absolutely nothing against him. A lot of people from the traditional finance space don't understand precious metals. They don't understand how to value them. They don't understand how their prices move. And even though they say investor psychology is wild, and I agree, they don't necessarily know how to apply investor psychology to the precious metals space. So if you come from a traditional finance background, or you have a friend or family member who has that kind of background, and they don't understand precious metals, this would be a very good video to share with them. It will help them wrap their head around this industry. So one of the things I want to show you is a series of charts of companies. Okay. So normally when we think of the traditional finance space, we're thinking about stocks. And one of the major things to understand is that with stocks, the biggest move comes early in that stock's history. And then the returns get smaller and smaller and smaller over time. So you get that big move first and then smaller returns. Precious metals work the opposite way. You get small returns first and then bigger returns over time. So let's look at a few very quickly. Microsoft here, this is going back to the mid 1980s, big returns early, smaller returns as you go. Oracle, very similar. Of course, there might be one or two years that are an exception, but Oracle looks this way. Okay, no problem. Cisco looks this way. A lot of companies look this way. And you might say, oh, that's just tech stocks. Okay, no, it's really every kind of company. Johnson and Johnson has a similar pattern. Walmart has a similar pattern. Coca-Cola has a similar pattern. Even Berkshire Hathaway has a similar pattern. So there are so many companies that follow this trend. And it really should make sense when you stop and think about it. When you're a small company, it's kind of easy to grow at 300 percent, a thousand percent. Okay, because you have a very small denominator from which to grow. But once you're already a billion dollar company, it's really hard to triple in size in a year. Okay, you might get 10 percent, 20 percent, but it's very hard to get 200 percent, 300 percent. So there's really nothing surprising about that. But when we talk about precious metals, it does become surprising. With precious metals, we get the biggest move towards the end. So you can see here the precious metals bull market of the 70s returns got higher over time. They went up, slight pullback, and then the rate of increase itself increased. Okay, so the slope of the line goes up. And what are we experiencing right now? The same thing. The returns get higher, a slight pullback, and then returns get even higher. And so you might wonder what I have going on with this chart here. I actually made this version of the chart halfway through 2025. And I purposely didn't update it to show you how the bull market is accelerating. In the middle of 2025, these solid bars here were what gold and silver had returned in the first half of 2025. And if you projected out the same growth by the end of 2025, it would have been the top of these two lines. However, in the second half of 2025, gold and silver did better than the first half. So that's the acceleration. And they finished the year around 64 percent and 146 percent for gold and silver respectively. So that's why this red line goes so steep upward. And what I'm expecting is 2026 will be even higher than 2025 because we get the biggest move towards the end. And I don't think we're at the end yet. So I would expect these returns in general to keep getting bigger until the end of the bull market. And so there are three key takeaways you have to understand on the differences between companies and monetary metals like gold and silver. The first is valuations. So company valuations rise with productivity and fall with inefficiency. Very important. And it's intuitive. However, monetary metals rise as trust erodes and they fall as confidence returns. It's a very different dynamic. Second, what are the limitations to those valuations? What are the maximums? What are the minimums? Well, companies are bounded by real world limits, people, capital, time, coordination. However, monetary metals like gold and silver are bounded by human perception, fear, belief, credibility. And this has implications on how fast those valuations can move as well. So the third piece here is speed. Companies accrue value at the speed of human organization. That's fairly slow. Monetary metals accrue value at the speed of collective realization, the speed of thought. So metals can be repriced very quickly. If enough people realize that the dollar or institutions are not trustworthy, the price of metals will shoot up. So if I don't believe that the dollar has any value and you give me a choice between one ounce of silver and a hundred dollars, well, I'm taking the silver. If you then give me the same choice between an ounce of silver or $200, I'm still taking the silver because I don't believe that the dollar has value. And so if you give me the same choice, an ounce of silver or $300, again, I'm still taking the silver because this 300 lies isn't really better than 200 lies and so on. And so that's why the price of a monetary metal can move so quickly, whereas the price of a company realistically cannot. So getting back to the sentiment here of investor psychology is wild. Yes, it is. And people are expecting silver to go to $500 an ounce by end of year 2026. Ha ha. What would be reasonable? Well, what if we go back and look at the previous bull run in silver and then just take the same numbers and apply them to today? That seems fair. That's the one reliable data point we have. So let's see if history repeats itself. What do we get? Well, here's what happened in 1979. So yesterday's closing price was January. Excuse me. Yesterday's closing date was January 22nd. OK, so that was ninety six. Eighty three. Let's go back to the 1979 analog of January 22nd. It was six dollars an ounce for silver. By the end of that year, 1979, the price was 3220 for a return of four hundred and nine percent. Now, if that same thing happens in 2026. Right. So it's not some hypothetical thing that one day could happen. This would be just if history repeats the same return. What would that price have to be at the end of 2026 in order to mimic the exact same return of what happened at the end of the previous bull market? Well, he's right. It wouldn't be this ludicrous, insane five hundred dollars an ounce. It would be the much more reasonable four hundred and ninety two.