Silver: Trading and Investing, With 20 Years of Real Swings
Silver is a precious metal traded as futures on COMEX, as exchange-traded funds such as the iShares Silver Trust (SLV), and as physical bars and coins. It swings far harder than stocks: since 2006 SLV's daily moves were about 1.7 times as large as the S&P 500's.
Silver sits between two worlds. It is a precious metal people store as money, and an industrial metal people use up. For a trader the practical fact is simpler: it moves a lot, in both directions, and the record of its moves is public.
How it works
Silver is priced in US dollars per troy ounce. The troy ounce is the unit used for precious metals, and it is the unit of both the futures contract and the fund described below.
The price is set by trading, not by a posted list. COMEX silver futures, listed by CME Group, trade from Sunday evening to Friday afternoon with a 60-minute break each day, according to CME Group’s contract page (read 25 Sep 2026). SLV’s iShares page instead names the LBMA Silver Price as its reference benchmark (read the same day), so the fund and the future are close relatives rather than one number.
Three ways to hold it
Futures. CME Group’s contract page gives the standard COMEX silver future as 5,000 troy ounces, quoted in dollars and cents per troy ounce, with a minimum move of 0.005 per ounce, which is $25.00 a contract. The contract is deliverable, and silver delivered against it must assay to a minimum of 999 fineness. A micro contract of 1,000 troy ounces moves $5.00 per minimum tick. (CME Group contract specifications, cmegroup.com, read 25 Sep 2026.)
A fund. The iShares Silver Trust, ticker SLV, “seeks to track the price performance of silver bullion”. Its page says it is not an investment company registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940, and not a commodity pool under the Commodity Exchange Act. On 25 Sep 2026 it reported 494,436,351.20 ounces in trust and 547,250,000 shares outstanding (ishares.com, read 25 Sep 2026).
Physical metal. Bars and coins are the third route, with dealer spreads and storage as the costs that matter. The site’s bullion page covers that route in detail.
A worked example
First, what one SLV share holds. Divide the ounces in trust by the shares outstanding: 494,436,351.20 / 547,250,000 = 0.9035 ounces per share on 25 Sep 2026. A share is therefore worth a little less than an ounce, and the quoted share price will sit below the silver price by about that ratio.
Next, what a futures contract moves. Yahoo Finance’s front-month COMEX series closed at $63.457 an ounce on 24 Sep 2026. One standard contract controlled 5,000 ounces, or about $317,285 of silver. A micro contract controlled 1,000 ounces, about $63,457.
Then a real bad day. On 29 Jan 2026 the same series closed at $114.037; on 30 Jan it closed at $78.29. That is $35.747 an ounce in one session, a fall of 31.3%. On one standard contract the move was $35.747 × 5,000 = $178,735, and on one micro contract $35,747. Both figures are larger than many accounts, which is why position size is the first decision in silver, not the last.
The original data
The data: every daily close of SLV from 28 Apr 2006 to 24 Sep 2026, 5,134 trading days, downloaded from Yahoo Finance on 25 Sep 2026, price only. The S&P 500’s daily closes were matched to the same dates, giving 5,129 day-to-day changes for both. The full series is published as a CSV of every SLV close.
Silver moved much harder than stocks. The standard deviation of SLV’s daily change was 2.10%, against 1.22% for the S&P 500 on the same dates. SLV closed 5% or more above or below the previous close on 163 of the 5,129 days, 3.2% of them; the S&P 500 did so on 35, or 0.7%.
Years were just as uneven. Measured from one year-end close to the next, SLV rose in 11 of the 19 full years from 2007 to 2025 and fell in 8, with a median year of +5.8%. The range ran from −36.3% in 2013 to +144.7% in 2025, when it went from $26.33 to $64.42.
The long wait and the fast fall
Silver can go nowhere for a very long time. SLV closed at $47.26 on 28 Apr 2011, fell as low as $11.21 on 18 Mar 2020, a drop of 76.3%, and did not close above the 2011 level until 15 Oct 2025. That is about 14.5 years below one high.
Then it moved too fast in the other direction. SLV’s record close was $105.60 on 28 Jan 2026. On 30 Jan it closed at $75.44, down 28.5% from the day before, its worst session in the file. By 16 Jul 2026 it had closed as low as $50.39, 52.3% under the record, and it stood at $57.62 on 24 Sep.
In the 24,971-video corpus this site studies, 78 titles mention silver the metal, leaving out the unrelated ICT “silver bullet” setup, from 58 channels at a median of about 3,650 views. The most-viewed of them are about buying and stacking metal rather than about how its price behaves.
When it fails
The first failure is sizing silver like an index fund. Its daily moves ran about 1.7 times those of the S&P 500, and its bad days were far worse: a 28.5% fall in one session is a crash in any market. A position that is comfortable in stocks can be two or three times too large in silver.
The second is treating it as a steady store of value. Anyone who bought SLV at the April 2011 close waited about 14.5 years to be even on price, and was down 76.3% at the worst point.
A third is confusing the share price with the metal price. One SLV share held about 0.9035 ounces on 25 Sep 2026, so comparing a share price with a per-ounce quote without that ratio gives the wrong answer.
A fourth is forgetting what a futures contract is. A standard COMEX contract is 5,000 ounces and is deliverable. The 30 Jan 2026 move of $178,735 on one contract shows how quickly margin can be exhausted, which the futures page explains in general.
And a fifth is reading a record as a trend. The record close of January 2026 was followed within six months by a fall of more than half.
Related
Gold trading covers the larger precious metal and how its trading compares with silver’s. Bullion explains buying, storing and selling physical bars and coins. And commodities sets silver in the wider world of futures curves, delivery and roll costs.
Size a silver position from its worst day, not its average one. A move that would be a once-a-decade crash in an index fund has happened in silver in the same year as its record high.
— Michael Whitman
This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.