Silver Hits All-Time High as Thanksgiving Night CME Outage Freezes Global Trading
- Thanksgiving night wasn’t quiet at all — nearly 90% of global derivatives trading suddenly froze when the CME shut down, right as silver was surging. Something you don’t see every holiday weekend.
- The official story is a data-center cooling failure in Illinois. Maybe true — but for the world’s biggest futures exchange to hinge on one air-conditioner? That’s the kind of thing you keep in the back of your mind.
- The halt stopped price discovery cold. Traders couldn’t adjust positions for over 10 hours, which is like pulling the steering wheel off a moving car. Markets do NOT like being blindfolded.
- The timing raised eyebrows because silver was breaking out to fresh highs. When a runaway rally pauses due to “technical issues,” people naturally wonder if someone needed a time-out.
- Once trading came back, silver didn’t exactly cool off — it blasted upward more than 5%, ending the week over $56/oz, a brand-new nominal record. That’s not a market that was calming down.
- Global fundamentals are tightening fast: China’s stockpiles hit 10-year lows, and 4 million ounces just quietly left the country. Silver’s moving around the world in big chunks lately.
- Turkey imported nearly 6 million ounces in October — not something you see every month. And India? They vacuumed up roughly 51 million ounces in the same month. That’s huge even by their standards.
- Meanwhile, we’re in year seven of a combined 1.347-billion-ounce global supply shortfall, largely thanks to industrial demand and ETF flows. Silver’s been running a deficit like it’s a lifestyle.
- The gold-silver ratio is still sitting near 75 — way above the historical average of ~30 — even though the world mines silver at only 7:1 relative to gold. If you like things that are historically out of whack, silver’s your metal.
- Gold already doubled, if silver simply follows the same script, triple-digit prices aren’t some wild fantasy — they’re just catching up. And right now, silver is still dramatically under-owned compared to the last big bull run.
A nearly 10-hour halt beginning at 9:44 p.m. ET on November 27 and lasting until 8:30 a.m. ET on November 28 stopped futures markets in their tracks — just as silver was breaking out — raising fresh questions about timing, market stress, and what comes next for precious metals.
Last evening, Thanksgiving night in the USA, at approximately 10:00 PM eastern east coast time.
A reported 90% percent of global derivatives trading stopped.
The COMEX NYMEX CME group (the world's largest derivatives marketplace) reported a cooling system failure at one of it data centers in Illinois, which led to a technical disruption that forced the exchange to suspend trading across all products.
This included a halt in futures contract trading in gold and silver as well as a wide range of markets, from other metals and energy to currencies and digital assets.
Heightened price volatility to the upside in silver prices in today's trading followed, silver closing at fresh new all time nominal record price high levels on the the week's holiday shortened trading.
Of course many market onlookers were not buying the CME Group's excuse for the trading halt, leaving many to believe it was indeed large orders in the holiday thin trading of silver that led to the trading halt so market makers could establish prices.
Here you can see wild one dollar down and one dollar up moves in the spot silver price last night, leading many to not believe the data center cooling system story.
We even had anonymous air conditioning technicians and experts chiming in on how silly the story was.
Where ever the truth lies we are unlikely to learn it, but following last evening's price discovery halt, the spot silver price especially went screaming upward jumping over 5% in nominal price on the today's trading.
Here is Bloomberg Canada with a bit more on the story.
So yea, silver spot over $56 oz here we are to close this month's trading of Nov 2025 with giant green candle.
The spot silver price traded sharply upward ending at $56.30 oz bid on the week and month's close.
The spot gold price ended this week trading at $4237 oz bid price.
The spot gold silver ratio fell sharply closing at 75 oz of spot silver to afford 1 oz of spot gold.
The spot gold silver ratio has been rather volatile all year ballooning as high as 106 back during the Trump tariff shock in the early Spring, to now the latest silver price rally to close November.
On a historical basis the spot gold silver ratio is still in nose bleed territory still hovering around 2.5 standard deviations above the historical mean or average of just below 30.
This is all going on in a world with an estimated -1.347 billion oz silver supply shortfall over the last seven years running most pouring into increasing silver industrial demands, but also into unsecured silver ETFs and ETP investment funds as well.
While the world newly mines about 7 oz of silver for every 1 oz of gold pulled from the Earth, it's hard to believe the spot gold silver ratio will stay elevated by more than a factor of ten versus its newly ounces mined ratio ongoing.
In a sign of the exciting silver market times, I was pleased to see long time industry colleague and friend Ronan Manly in images from the recent Dubai Precious Metals conference where the world's largest silver bullion bar was photographed and used to promote the event.
The now Guinness Record breaking largest silver bullion bar was reported to weigh 1971 kilograms to signify the year that Dubai was founded (and a likely nod and wink to that same year the US government defaulted on gold outflows to US dollar holding sovereign nations.
63,369 oz silver bar at spot $56.30 oz means that bar at the moment is $3.57 million and likely climbing to come.
The mainstream financial media is now reporting that silver stockpiles in China have collapsed to ten year low levels.
And this week, we saw another outflow of nearly this time nearly -4 million oz leaving China heading elsewhere in the world.
Where is that silver heading?
Hard to know, but a few major silver import data points for October 2025 just came through this week.
The Turkish silver import data for last month was the second highest silver import flow on record.
Turkey importing nearly 6 million oz of silver in an increasingly tight world silver market is worth taking note of.
Much larger still is the amount of silver that India imported this past month Oct 2025 importing some 1600 tons or some 51.4 million oz of silver imports in October alone. That will be the 6th largest silver bullion importation month for India this 21st Century.
To add further perspective, this imported amount of silver is over half the entire reported piles of silver bullion sitting in the nation's ten unsecured silver ETFs and ETPs.
To close I want you to get a sense of just how far silver has to run to catch up with what gold has already done in fiat US dollar terms to date.
The spot price of gold has more than doubled since breaking out of it old price cup near $1900 oz earlier this decade.
So silver triple digits per troy ounce seems inevitable in time judging by what gold has already achieved in spot price terms to date.
An even with large capital inflows into unsecured Western world silver ETFs over the last month.
When we consider where all combined silver ETFs are in terms of their collective market share versus all other ETF assets combined. We can see that we are currently only about 1/4th of where this chart peaked in the last major bull run for silver in early 2011.
Silver remains dramatically under-owned and underinvested in, for now at least.
That will be all for this Week's Bullion Market Update.
As always, to you out there.
Take great care of yourselves and those you love.
REFERENCES:
Silver price hits record following CME Group COMEX trading outage
https://youtu.be/qC5MDOGu9Gs?si=QVS3K5sdu46wNWSu
