Silver Hits 14-Year High: What New Investors Need to Know
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Silver hit a milestone: Silver prices touched nearly $40 an ounce, the highest nominal level in 14 years, highlighting growing strength in the precious metals market.
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Why it matters: While critics call silver “dead money,” long-term holders see years of low prices as a chance to quietly build positions.
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Global recognition: The U.S. officially labeled silver a “critical metal,” essential for everything from electronics to solar panels—yet supply remains tight.
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Ongoing shortage: For five straight years, the silver market has been in deficit, with demand outpacing mine supply and recycling.
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Central bank moves: Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund dipped into silver investments, while emerging markets keep favoring gold and silver over U.S. bonds.
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Consumer demand is global: India leads with strong silver bar buying, Germany just hit record highs in euros despite heavy VAT, and Australia favors bullion bars over coins.
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IRA opportunity in the U.S.: Bullion-backed IRAs "Gold IRA" are growing, though investors are warned about high-fee phone dealers that can erode retirement savings.
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Gold leads, silver follows: Gold’s surge often precedes silver’s catch-up. Many analysts expect silver to outperform gold in percentage terms over the next decade.
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Cultural memory and trust: In places like Germany (scarred by hyperinflation) and India (with deep cultural demand), silver is more than an asset—it’s a safeguard.
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The big picture: Precious metals are benefiting from rising debt, money creation, and currency pressures. With only a fraction of the public invested, silver’s story may just be getting started.
Discover why silver demand is surging worldwide, what it means for supply, and how gold and silver trends are shaping the future of precious metals.
A good close and week's performance for notably silver and also gold.
I know what naysayers are thinking, 14 yrs of being dead money. Big whup!
Well that was 14 yrs to acquire bullion tonnage at silly low price points and relative valuation levels versus many bubble market price high alternatives.
If buying low and owning assets on the rise is the game, grizzled bullion stackers are doing just fine. This building worldwide precious metals bull market is still early to middle innings depending the timeline used to define it.
S&P 500 stocks in the US are still nominally priced to delusion. Gold could again outperform them by a factor of 8 times here to later mania phase lows in the 2030s for instance.
The silver side of this coming wealth transfer is even more pronounced with potential of outperformance around a factor of 16 looking out towards next decade.
Shoutout to the Silver Squeezers out there buying silver bullion in solidarity on this the final trading day of the month of August.
Of course the shorts wouldn't let the monthly silver candle finish above the round $40 figure so as not to attract too many levered momentum trader flows.
Better slower and steady anyways. Legit stackers know their fundamentals, and are quietly training in the dark waiting for the inevitable moves over $50 oz with increasing normies wondering where you got your buff bullion body from.
Interestingly this week, the United States has finally come clean for the first time acknowledging the fact that Silver is a nationally critical metal, one we'd be back in the stone ages without.
You like your electronics, solar panels or 1000s of other things we have to have for our modern world.
Well, the supply is not keeping up with demand.
And this now 5 year running silver market deficit trend is likely only going to get wider in the foreseeable future.
Internally we use about 5 times more silver than we mine and the only way you will likely get much of the longer term silver bullion out of domestic US citizenry stashes is to see the silver spot price multifold many fold in the future.
The Saudi Arabian central bank SWF recently dipped a toe into silver derivatives and associated silver miner index to the tune of around $40 million outlay. Something but we're talking about a fund that has over a half trillion in net assets under management, so less than 1% allocation to silver proxies for now.
The Vietnamese gold market has ended the state monopoly on gold imports and exports and the production of bullion products which is good news for local stackers looking to buy lower margin bullion over high grade jewelry.
Dear Vietnamese stackers look at the gold chart on the left vs the silver cup formed chart on the right. Silver in fiat dong terms has to double from here simply to match what gold has already done. Find and buy some silver bullion in other words for the long haul.
Fiat M2 US dollar accounts onshore are blowing to record highs yet again, the currency creators are hard at work debasing the circulating dominate reserve currency.
But for many emerging markets, they continue to buy bullion over bonds as displayed by this excellent chart. Foreign central banks now own more in bullion and US bonds.
I expect the yellow line will continue forming a U shape in coming decade as the blue line rolls over back towards 10% and possibly lower as the ongoing bullion over bonds trade marches onwards.
For those emerging markets that bought gold over US treasuries, it has been an excellent trade since the Covid 2020 levels. Hard to see these trends changing much given the underlying market fundamentals.
Scottsdale Mint's Josh Phair put it succinctly.
"Imagine creating paper/digital money out of thin air and then using some to auto buy Gold.
There are many central banks doing this monthly/quarterly as they raise % backing of Gold.
Most in finance aren't understanding this driver.
H I G H E R."
And the yellow portion of this chart wider in the years to come as gold out peforms every fiat currency as it has done since time immemorial.
Stick around, on the other side of this break we will look at this recent report by Metals Focus and the Silver Institute regarding the most volatile demand factor for the coming silver bullion bull market mania.
As we look specifically at the four largest silver investment demand markets and consider trends to come.
The spot silver and gold markets moved higher on the week. Platinum also closed at 11 year monthly high levels.
The spot silver price finished at 39.68 oz bid and the spot gold price ended at $3,449.37 oz bid.
The spot gold silver ratio fell to a still historically high level of 86.
As mentioned, the Silver institute & Metals Focus Report on Major Silver Investment Demand Markets this week has data that often spans over 15 years timeframes since before spot price silver last touched $40 oz
"Physical investment is a structurally important part of global silver demand, and the most volatile. Notably, over the past 15 years, physical silver investment has ranged between a low of 157.2 million ounces (Moz) in 2017 and a record high of 337.6 Moz, established in 2022. With growing geopolitical tensions, rising government debt, and an increasing investor perception that silver is undervalued compared to gold, the silver price has experienced a 34 percent year-to-date increase."
We're going to do a deeper dive here on the 4 major silver investment demand markets the USA, India, Germany, and Australia.
You can see the swings over the past 15 years have been just under 150 million to over 250 million ounces in global silver investment demand in a market of just over 1 billion ounces in global demand.
The analyst team at Metals Focus points out that within the largest silver investment demand market, the USA the largest potential for investment demand growth is perhaps the often poorly serviced Bullion IRA sector.
I could literally create a channel on YouTube simply focused on the myriad buffoonery and unscrupulous sales tactics many boiler room coin dealers use to often steal more than half of average US investor's IRAs by selling them overpriced odd weight silver and gold coins.
Just turn on your favorite conservative talking head, and high chance they are selling their flock to the poor house by suggesting some Glenn Beck like used car salesman shop to buy you Gold or Silver IRA at.
It's specifically why founder Tyler Wall of SD Bullion decided to buy a gigantic secure bonded warehouse with high level vaulting so as to offer bullion storage and bullion IRA servicing.
I've seen it first hand, very professional. I have also seen other major IRA depositories in this industry, and while I will not name names. I would run away from almost any and all I have ever seen in person.
I literally have people in my close circles now looking to get their IRAs into bullion, silver and gold low margin bullion owned outright. The last thing I want to see is for any close contacts or any of you all out there it to get Great Taken.
Of course I am sending them to SDBullion.com/IRA
Traditional and ROTH IRAs owned outright for you retirement makes complete common sense and SD Bullion has streamlined the process.
Back to the ongoing silver bullion investment demand picture globally. It is silver's ability to outperform gold and the fact that gold is beginning to nominally seem so highly priced that is one of the reasons why we will likely see many would be gold bullion buyers move over towards silver in the coming decade.
Look around the world, silver is still historically cheap in most of the major fiat currency markets whereas gold is already off and running higher. Gold leads, silver follows.
In the USA over the past few years, some secondary products have come back into the domestic market reducing the need for freshly stuck brand new coins and bars as secondary or gently used product inflows have compressed margins and built up dealer inventories. Of course much of that silver sold is also often going to refiners to help meet ongoing silver market deficits as well.
Similar story on the US silver bullion bar side of the equation.
Looking at the second largest silver investment demand market with India. Where the local silver rupee price has busted out of its silver cup formation and is now racing to outperform gold.
India is basically about 80% of Asian silver investment demand and about 1/4th of world demand.
Average retail premiums for small silver bullion coins in India are ridiculously high and therefore the local Indian market is mainly dominated by silver bullion bar demand. 31.1 grams is one troy ounce for reference here.
Indian silver bullion bar demand over silver investment coin demand can range as high as a factor of double to quadruple in total ounces sold to local investors.
The vast majority of Indian silver bullion bar buyers are getting tinier bars weighing from 1.5 to just over 3 oz size formats.
Looking over to the 3rd largest silver investment demand market of Germany a nation who 3 to 4 generations ago suffered a brutal hyperinflation.
It looks like silver in local fiat Euro terms likely neared or possibly hit its all time nominal price high today.
Let's check the closing spot price in fiat euros, and yes. All time record nominal price high, see you later das Hunt Brothers.
The local European powers that bee don't want their citizens buying silver bullion, sweet spot +19% VAT tax euros. At least the Germans and other EU nations can get investment grade 999 fine gold without VAT taxes still and thus Germany is dominated by gold demand.
If I were in the EU looking at the cup formation of silver relative to where gold has gone, and simply just pay the +19% VAT as silver can make that breakeven in a good year in a matter of a few good months running higher. Silver locally has to go near $70 oz in fiat euro just to match what gold has already done to date, so get long silver perhaps offshore with SD Bullion vault storage and sidestep VAT taxes so you don't miss out on higher relative silver valuation climbs upcoming.
Turning finally to our mates down under. I didn't realize you all were such bullion bar stackers well preferred over bullion coins based on this data.
Your long-term gold vs silver in fiat Aussie dollars chart suggests the local silver price has to triple from here just to match what gold has already done to date. So Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, get long silver bullion bars and coins.
To conclude, only a tiny percentage of the western and eastern world is even conscious of the burgeoning silver bull about to melt faces. We are literally back at 2019 levels of silver investment demand with some of the best years likely not far from now.
Silver follows gold, so get long silver billionaires out there.
That will be all for this week's SD Bullion Market Update.
Reference:
Key Physical Silver Investment Markets
Prepared by Metals Focus, August 2025:
https://silverinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/NEW-Market_Trend_Report-Key_Physical_Silver_Investment_Markets_by_Metals_Focus_8-2025.pdf
