“Gold on crack”: why silver is set to soar

To like silver, first you must love gold. One of HSBC’s gold traders once described silver as “gold on crack”. It sums it up beautifully. Silver is highly correlated with gold, around 80%, which means the two metals generally move in sync. But silver has a “beta” of 1.4 times compared with gold – in other words, it is 1.4 times more volatile. That means silver wins on the way up and causes mayhem on the way down.

The key chart to keep in mind is the gold-to-silver ratio (GSR). An ounce of gold currently buys 66 ounces of silver. In 2020, at the depths of the Covid crash, the gold-to-silver ratio touched 124, the cheapest recorded price in history. That was $12 an ounce of silver, when gold was $1,486; hence a gold-to-silver ratio of 124.