Washington state, as part of their frenzy of tax increases, decided that gold and silver bullion will be subject to the sales tax. Poof! There goes any point in investing in gold and silver. (Collector coins, too.)

This is the "dump" part of pump and dump. TikTok influencers have been pushing the gold & silver rally for weeks now, and it was inevitable that people at the top would eventually cash out.

Crypto markets won in the sense that every single asset class can somehow trade like a memecoin now.

This was an inevitable correction. Gold and silver had gone parabolic for the past month. Nothing goes straight up. This takes the gold price all the way back to where it was last week.

Honestly, I don't think Warsh's appointment had much to do with it.

Silver has plenty of industrial uses. Very little has changed in industry to cause demand or supply shifts to match the massive price swings. Thus a lot of this is probably meme investors gambling

We knew the correction was coming, but I don't think anyone expected the 30% move in one day.

It still up an awful lot from the start of 2025. From about 30 up to 115 and down to 85.

Wouldn't even say this is interesting

If memory serves, 1980 was the time of the silver corner by a couple of brothers.

This isn't a simple correction. I've been following this for a couple of months and there's a lot going on. I suspect this isn't over. It's noteworthy that the year 1980 because that was when the Hunt brothers tried to corner the silver market. It's often used as an example of the market correcting itself. It's actually a better example of how the exchanges broke the Hunt brothers to bail out the banks.

The key event that caused the collapse is sometimes called Silver Thursday [1]. The exchange changed the liquidity rules, forcing a margin call the Hunt brothers couldn't make, forcing a selloff. This was arguably to bail out banks with large short positions in silver.

Well, pretty much the exact same thing happened this week when COMEX massively increased the margin requirements [2]. It's worth noting that the market is in a state called "backwardation" where the spot prices are higher than future prices. Refiners aren't buying silver, even at the inflated spot price, because of price risk. But also, the COMEX spot price is increasingly being viewed as "fake" because foreign exchanges are paying significantly more for physical silver thna the paper COMEX price [3].

Basically, this whole thing looks like another GameStop ie a short squeeze. There's not enouugh physical silver to meet contract demands. There's like 300oz of futures silver contracts per 1oz of physical silver.

If you followed the original GameStop short squeeze, the price tumbled there too but didn't solve the short squeeze. You even have exchanges closing people's options positions (eg RobinHood) despite them being in the money.

Banks still need to cover their significant short positions and it really looks like the exchanges are trying to crash the silver market to do it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday

[2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-28/cme-raise...

[3]: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4861917-why-silver-prices-i...

While not unexpected, the numbers still say that if you bought silver before Trump (which given history of metals countering uncertainty and the promised causes of uncertainty was a smart move), you're making a solid > doubling even now. For me, though, who gets too anxious when trying to attempt such things and ends up ruining it, it'll just go on the list of regrets like when I thought to but didn't invest in zoom once we started using it in 2020.

I knew that Silver prices were going all time high but I had still assumed that Silver (and to that extent Gold) were stable.

Looks like atleast for Silver, that gets completely thrown out of the window now for some time.

I also thought Gold was a safe haven but I checked and it seems that it lost (10%?)-ish as well.

I have some complex thoughts and reasonings but I really liked Gold as an idea but looks like it is vulnerable to volatility at times too.

I used to think that maybe banks can have gold itself and gold usually does or ~ equal to inflation itself rise and I mean theoretically net I think even this year it does definitely beat Inflation (I mean it grew double I guess in 1 year) but for banking concerns especially supposing someone got money this time and let's hypothetically assume they get into this gold bank, then its still volatile & they could've lost 10% and then tried to withdraw money and more short squeeze so the idea has a major flaw after this incident.

I wonder how swiss franc is doing. I looked at it and it looks like its doing fine (1% down but I do feel like that's really okay) given how Swiss franc (seeing another cnbc article or yahoo finance ig) grew what 13-14%

Although the problem with people holding swiss franc is that when I searched swiss franc I found this article (from CNBC itself) which actually shows how a strong swiss franc might be/is bad for swiss economy

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/28/swiss-franc-us-dollar-price-...

I do wonder, then what's the ideal solution of "safety"

I am scratching a lot of options now & I am either thinking US inflation protected assets or World Equity are the only two stable/(really valuable) because the whole essense of value behind gold/silver was its stability which especially for silver feels broken but gold isn't that far behind either.

Although atleast in my original context of banking, I later came to know about the concept of narrow banking and how there was a bank which actually wanted to invest in TIPS itself but that was blocked off by the feds for many reason.

I do feel like TIPS might protect inflation protection but they don't really protect the erosion of wealth because I feel like (I am not sure I can be wrong I usually am) but the pricing of houses and other assets are rising higher than inflation rises & inflation itself can vary depending (so housing rent inflation might be higher) & depending on your lifestyle. Maybe TIPS really wouldn't be able to help you to say.. save to get house or really have you give the ability for money to do what it actually does. To me the idea of inflation includes buying houses too so if say someone with some salary was able to buy a house 20 years ago then imo when I consider inflation protection or investing or anything in general, I expect that my wealth could be able to buy me things ~generally at a good amount & that's the point of good investing to get good returns at understandable/ your own risk profile.

I guess now I am personally more inclined towards world index funds in general I guess as a form of real stability where value gains are still backed by real gains (Something which I feel is core philosophy of the bogle philosphy & the reason why people should invest in first place)

I may have gotten a bit off topic here but coming on the point again here about Silver.

Would this be considered as (expected?) or is it a black swan event especially considering the 30% fall off.

From the headline, it feels like a black swan event (especially when they compare it to 1980's) but I am curious to know what others think too. I do feel like these black swan events really shift how we think tho & we can have it in our better judgement for future ig imo.

This looks like an IQ test, but for who?

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