Silver price plunges again: volatility and project economics lens for miners
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on MINING.com
30 Second Briefing
Silver plunged more than 15% to about $75/oz on Thursday, extending last week’s record crash and leaving prices roughly 35% below the $121.64/oz all‑time high reached last month after a 130% year‑on‑year surge. Metals Daily CEO Ross Norman blames heavy speculation in China for “wreaking havoc” on bullion price discovery, with Sucden Financial’s Daria Efanova and Viktoria Kuszak describing a “flow‑driven” market dominated by CTA and speculative positioning rather than physical fundamentals. Gold also slipped about 3% to $4,800/oz, now 10% below pre‑crash levels.
Technical Brief
- Intraday silver move exceeded 15% during Thursday’s New York session, erasing two days of gains.
- Selling pressure began in Asian hours and continued through the New York open, mirroring last Friday’s crash.
- One‑year silver price appreciation above 130% has been driven by both industrial and safe‑haven demand.
- Chinese speculative buying since late 2025 produced a parabolic price path before the recent collapse.
- Ross Norman (Metals Daily) describes current bullion pricing as detached from underlying physical‑market drivers.
- Sucden Financial’s Daria Efanova and Viktoria Kuszak characterise silver as in a “highly flow‑driven” phase.
- Their view is that CTA and speculative positioning now dominate price action over structural physical tightness.
- Bloomberg’s Mark Cranfield flags $71 as this week’s low and $70 as a technically more important support.
Our Take
With silver still up more than 130% year-on-year even after a 35% pullback from the $121.64/oz peak, many primary and by-product silver projects in the USA and elsewhere are likely to remain well in the money, which can encourage operators to press ahead with marginal expansions despite the volatility.
The related 2 February piece on JPMorgan’s $6,300/oz gold target underscores that major banks still see structurally high precious metal pricing, so the current silver drawdown towards the $70–$75/oz area may be treated by project financiers more as a stress-test scenario than a base case in economic models.
Our database shows silver and gold recurring across hundreds of recent Mining items, but this kind of extreme price swing is relatively rare in the coverage, signalling that risk teams on US- and Asia-focused projects may need to revisit hedging strategies and covenant thresholds to cope with similar shocks.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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