GOLD, SILVER, COPPER or none of them?

🥇 Gold and silver have been on an extraordinary run to start 2026. Gold is pushing around 5,000–5,600 per ounce, more than doubling since September 2024 after gaining around 60% in 2025. Silver has moved even more aggressively, breaking above 120 per ounce and posting one of the strongest short-term rallies in its modern trading history. 

🥈 From a market perspective, both metals are extremely stretched. The GLD (SPDR Gold) ETF has recently traded roughly 35–40% above its 200-day moving average, while SLV (iShares Silver Trust) has been more than 100% above its own 200-day average — levels that historically have only appeared near periods of near-term exhaustion. Silver’s momentum has been particularly intense, with multi-day streaks of 3%+ gains that are rare even for a volatile commodity. Technical indicators such as RSI are also sitting at historically elevated levels, suggesting the trade is crowded and vulnerable to a pullback even if the longer-term trend remains intact. 

🧈 Still, the move does not look like a simple speculative blow-off. Demand data from the World Gold Council shows that global gold demand reached record levels in 2025, with investment demand rising sharply and central banks continuing to accumulate gold at a historically elevated pace. This clearly reflects institutional and sovereign behavior. Many central banks have been gradually increasing gold’s share of reserves while reducing exposure to U.S. Treasuries and the USDOLLAR which points to a deeper shift in how countries think about long-term currency risk. 

🏦 That broader context matters. Gold’s rally increasingly looks less like a trade on CPI prints and more like a reaction to uncertainty around monetary credibility and geopolitical alignment. Persistent budget deficits, rising debt burdens, growing political pressure on central banks, and accelerating de-dollarization efforts — particularly among BRICS-linked countries — all feed into a longer-term narrative in which gold plays a larger role as a reserve asset. 

🥉 At the same time, copper has been sending a parallel signal from a more industrial angle. Prices have surged as demand expectations rise around electrification, AI infrastructure, data center buildouts, grid expansion, and re-industrialization. Structural supply constraints make the setup especially tight: global copper consumption is already running near 30 million tonnes per year, while only a small fraction is met through recycling. Even without incremental electrification, meeting baseline global growth over the next two decades would require mining as much copper as humanity extracted over the last several thousand years combined — a scale challenge that is increasingly reflected in price action and miner equity performance. Copper’s strength reinforces the idea that capital is rotating not just into defensive stores of value like gold, but also into the physical materials required to rebuild and expand the real economy.

🧠 What stands out most right now is the divergence between gold and equities. In prior periods where gold surged at anything close to this pace — most notably in the 1970s and the early 2000s — equity markets struggled and confidence in the dollar weakened. Today, gold is pricing in stress and regime risk, but equities remain near all-time highs, supported largely by a narrow group of large technology companies. That gap is unusual. It does not guarantee an equity selloff, but it does suggest that different parts of the market are telling very different stories about the underlying stability of the system.

🔘 Silver adds another layer to this picture. Unlike gold, silver is not only a monetary asset but also a key industrial input, with demand tied to solar panels, electrification, EVs, grid expansion, and increasingly data centers and compute infrastructure. Structural supply deficits and limited flexibility on the mining side have made the market tighter over time. In bullish scenarios, strategists often point to the gold–silver ratio: if gold continues higher and the ratio compresses toward historical bull-market ranges, silver prices in the 150–200 range become mathematically plausible. At the same time, silver has a history of overshooting and then correcting sharply, so even strong long-term setups have often come with 20–40% drawdowns along the way.

📈 Wall Street forecasts have moved meaningfully higher alongside spot prices. Goldman Sachs recently lifted its EOY gold target toward the mid-5,000s, UBS has discussed upside scenarios north of 6,000, and JPMorgan has floated much higher theoretical levels in scenarios where investors rotate capital out of bonds and into real assets. The precise targets matter less than the broader signal: price levels that would have sounded unrealistic six months ago are now part of mainstream market discussion, which often coincides with more crowded positioning.

💰 Taken together, we view gold, silver, and copper less as trades to chase at current levels and more as signals about how investors are thinking about risk and the real economy. Gold reflects rising concern about currency stability and policy credibility. Silver captures both monetary hedging and industrial demand tied to electrification and compute. Copper speaks to the physical constraints of the AI era; the reality that software breakthroughs still require enormous amounts of power, wiring, hardware, and raw materials.

📊 As with AI-driven equities, our approach is not to deny the trend, but to avoid overpaying for it. We respect the structural case for precious and industrial metals, but we prefer to add exposure on meaningful pullbacks rather than after vertical rallies, as we did yesterday. 

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