WHEN TO SELL SILVER

If you are sitting on some that is. Otherwise, the question is, should I buy now?

My reading of the situation is that silver at 110 dollars an ounce is a play with limited downside and unlimited upside. So it's a Buy even at these levels. 

But, but, 

The prices have gone up 250 percent in one year. 

It is highly volatile.

True. But the market does not price past moves, it prices future expectations. And volatility is different from risk. 

Why is it a play with limited downside? 

The industrial demand, including new uses 

The classification of silver as a critical mineral by the US 

China introducing export controls 

The de-dollarisation process that is underway 

Increasing geopolitical uncertainty 

The ratio of gold to silver prices compared to historical levels 

Why is it a play with unlimited upside? 

All the factors I listed above, plus

The fact that silver is being rediscovered as a monetary metal. It has been a monetary metal for 5000 years, but we have forgotten that 

The fact that retail investors are just beginning to discover it 

The short squeeze on the big billion banks that is imminent and in fact underway 

The scarcity of above ground available stocks 

The fact that most silver  that is consumed for industrial use does not come back

The fact that eighty percent of silver being mined currently is accounted for by industrial needs, and the balance twenty percent is not sufficient to meet investment demand

The fact that the price of silver has been kept suppressed for fifty years. What we are seeing now is not a routine upmove but a structural repricing, a move to a new reality 

The fact that it is cheap when looking at the gold -silver ratio, the Dow-silver ratio, and the inflation adjusted price for the 1980 and 2011 highs 

What about Gold then? 

Gold is the mother ship. When you sell your silver, shift into gold. 

And when would that be? 

When the gold silver ratio drops below 30 

And when would that be? 

Soon 

What about stocks? 

Are you sure you want too much of stocks in your portfolio right now? Exit, and move to metals 

What about other metals? 

Copper, lead, zinc, uranium, are all good. They are all  only possible in Futures in the Indian market, or in related stocks. Uranium is not possible to invest in In the Indian market. 

Anything else? 

Energy stocks, oil futures 

What if I am already in silver and want to book some profits, say, exit twenty percent of my position? 

Sure, not a bad idea to do that 

If I exit, and don't need the money right now, where should I put it, apart from gold? 

Look at platinum. It is cheap right now compared to silver and to gold 

Where do I get platinum in India? 

Zaveri Bazar in Mumbai 

If gold and silver are shooting up like this, does it indicate troubling times ahead? 

Yes 

Dinesh Gopalan,

30 January, 2026 

( Posted to my blog https://www.dineshgopalan.com)

PROGRESS

It is a world of illusion, 

A fantasy land of plenty;

Where prices keep going up, 

In illusory token money! 

The government keeps printing more and more, 

For money is the wealth you see; 

Till you have lots and lots of wealth,

But can't afford the bread you eat! 

Everything is priced in money, 

Which is but a piece of paper; 

It becomes cheaper to burn it,

To keep warm, for firewood costs more! 

And then the great reset happens, 

Money becomes those things that you own; 

Not paper conjured out of thin air,

Money is only silver and gold! 

Dinesh Gopalan,

29 January, 2026

TRADING DILEMMAS

It is not easy buying and selling stocks or commodities when the prices are highly volatile. 

It is not easy buying or selling  something when the prices have gone up substantially, or gone down substantially. 

When gold was at 50,000 for ten grams, I used to get this question a lot.

" It has already gone up, should I buy now? Or wait?" 

Wait for what? 

A pullback! 

Well, the pullback never happened and gold is at 168000 per ten grams now. 

The same question now repeats. 

Silver is another example. It was at one lakh rupees per kg one year back, and now it is at 373,000 per kg. 

" OMG! Can I buy now?! It's gone up so much! "

There are people who will always feel that the prices are too high, and they will wait for a pullback to buy. Pullback from where? What if it goes up to 420000 from here and drops to 390000? Will you buy? 

I will blame the so called equity analysts and experts for this. "Buy on dips" they will tell you. I have never understood what "buy on dips" means. 

What if I told you I expect silver to go to 6 lakhs by end of this year? Will you buy? 

Worse than the buying decision is the selling decision. I bought silver in September when it was 150000 per kg. What should I do now? Sell? Sell half so that I recover my principal? Sell one third? Sell and invest the proceeds where? 

Silver has been known to correct up to fifty percent in past bull runs. That is stomach churning volatility! 

What if silver happens to be fifty percent of my total investment portfolio? What if it happens to be just 5 percent? Will the answer be different in either case? 

"Book part profits and de-risk. Diversify" say all the investment gurus. That is good advice. 

"Diversification is reversion to the mean. It shows that you have no conviction. If you want to make money, real money, you have to bet your shirt on your maximum conviction trade" say some investment greats. This is also good advice. 

"Depends on what you want in life. If you have reached for target profit, exit" say some people. But the target is a constantly moving thing, it vacillates along with greed and fear! 

"You have already made enough, why do you want more" say others. Very philosophical, and I have said the same to other people in several different contexts. But when it comes to myself, "enough" is a philosophy that is difficult to put into practice. 

There is no one answer to the above questions. It is an ever changing trade-off between risk and stability, greed and fear, philosophy and practicality, risk tolerance versus risk aversion, coupled with my own  comfort in dealing with money, my upbringing, my conviction and my aspirations. 

And then there is luck. Never underestimate luck, or the divine hand of providence! 

I invested in silver four months back when it was 150000 per kg in September. My investment, then and more so now, is a substantial portion of my investment basket. Silver is now at 370000 per kg. 

What would you do if you were in my position? 

Would love to know your thoughts.

A PRIMER ON SILVER PRICES

I have been tracking the silver market closely for a few months now. What I have learnt about how prices are arrived at is interesting. 

I never thought there were so many possible prices, all of them correct and all of them wrong at the same time. 

To set the context, COMEX silver price right now is 109 dollars for a troy ounce, which is 31.1 grams. 

The benchmark price worldwide is set by the COMEX in Chicago. This is an online exchange and operates 24/7 between Sunday evening and Friday evening US time. 

The COMEX price of silver has been suppressed for the last fifty years, and that stranglehold is beginning to break. By whom and for what reason it was suppressed is a topic for another day. 

COMEX trades mostly physical contracts, with very few contracts standing for delivery. The amount of paper contracts is a hundred, or more, maybe a thousand  times the size of actually available silver. 

Big Banks have been shorting silver for years and they are sitting on huge short positions which they will need to cover by buying them back in the next five months or so. Meanwhile, the price of silver has shot up so much that they are sitting on billions of dollars of losses. Big enough number of billions to turn some of them insolvent. 

The Shanghai market which is the other main market, operates mainly on physical delivery. The price there right now is 125 dollars. 

Arbitragers should be buying silver by the truckload and flying it to Shanghai to make easy risk free money. Except that the metal is difficult to source right now, they need to find the physical first. 

However, either Shanghai prices have to come down or Comex prices have to go up, or both. Arbitrage of more than a couple of dollars is not sustainable. 

Silver has risen about 250 percent in the last one year, and in what can only be called Silveronomics as opposed to normal economics, the demand has exploded as the price has gone up. And supply is getting scarcer by the day. 

Spot prices in the Indian market should be ideally the Comex dollar price divided by 31.1, times the  exchange rate, times 1.09. That 9 percent is six percent customs duty and 3 percent gst. The actual street prices on any given day are between minus 0.25 percent to plus 1.5 percent of this number. 

The Indian ETFs base their prices on Street prices in India. They are typically about 1.5 percent above street price. Last week it went to about 6 percent higher than street price and swung to 5 percent lower than street price the immediately next day. That variation is due to local supply demand dynamics. 

The futures prices on MCX are a little higher than spot, which is normal. However, silver is beginning to see instances of Backwardation worldwide which means spot is quoting higher than futures. This indicates a highly stressed physical market with scarcity of supply. 

The street prices I am talking of are the prices at Zaveri Bazar or equivalent places in Bangalore, Ahmedabad, etc. The prices at big branded shops will be more, since they add their own margins. 

I am still talking about silver bars and not jewelry. For jewelry, add twenty percent or more to this price. 

That is as far as the market is concerned. 

If you have bought silver, there is also: 

The price at which you have bought, 

Your target profit,

Your expectation of future prices,

Your risk tolerance, and 

Your position sizing, 

These are the factors that will influence your decision on when to sell. 

Another thing I have learnt over the last few months is that the main stream media is not to be trusted. If you follow only main stream media, you will be an ignorant lout who is thoroughly manipulated by narratives, in short a dumb sucker. 

THE SILVER DENOUEMENT

I have been tracking silver prices quite closely for the last couple of months. The dynamics are extremely interesting, to say the least. 

The benchmark silver price is the one that is set by COMEX, the online exchange at Chicago, which runs 24/7 from Sunday evening Eastern Time to Friday evening Eastern Time. The amount of paper contracts that are traded on the Comex are a thousand times ( or some such huge number, every expert has a different huge number) the actual quantity of silver on the planet. 

The actual quantity of silver on the planet is miniscule. The value of all above ground silver stocks in the world at today's prices is less than the market cap of NVidea or Microsoft. 

The paper prices on the Comex have been suppressed for the last fifty years by the deep state and MIC ( Military Industrial Complex) for nefarious reasons of their own. Gold is a similar story though to a lesser extent. 

In order to keep the price suppressed, big banks have been shorting silver and they are sitting on huge short positions totalling to billions and billions and billions of dollars. 

Silver has been a monetary metal and store of value, along with gold, for 5000 years. Silver is referred to as the poor man's gold, silver for the commoners, and gold for the kings. 

The western centric financial system and educational complex has managed to wipe out the collective memory of their peoples when it comes to silver and gold. They think that piece of worthless paper which is fiat currency and all that is based on fiat like bonds, debt, equity, etc are the real thing. All educated people in India think so too. The poor know better. Gold and silver are the true stores of value, the rest is maya, illusion. 

When anything is kept suppressed for so long the pressure builds. When finally the steam escapes from the pressure cooker, it bursts and hits the ceiling. The exact same thing is happening to silver right now. 

A group of people  have got together to break the chokehold of the big banks on silver. All they have to do to break the market is to demand delivery on the Comex when contracts mature. That's it, it's like a bank run. The amount of paper promises being an order of magnitude higher than actual silver, one of two things will happen. Either the price will go up up and up ( the appreciation in silver in the last one year is 200 percent, and in gold is close to 100 percent), or the market will break and Comex will declare default, or both. The prices have already started moving. The default scenario is very real and may happen. If that happens, it will be one big nail in the coffins of the western financial system, the US dollar, and western hegemony. 

One nail, so many coffins! Which is why the "group of people" we referred to who are doing this include India, China and Russia. Yes, as in the nations themselves!

What is happening to silver, and to a lesser extent to gold right now is not a routine price move. It is a re-pricing, the kind of event that happens only once in any person's lifetime. 

Expect the prices to go up much much higher from here. 

If you already own silver, rejoice.

RACE TO THE APOCALYPSE

Silver has been on a tear in the last few months. Both gold and silver outperform when fiat currencies have over extended themselves. Silver is the more volatile between the two, but gold is the big brother. 

Yesterday night, gold went on a sprint. Like the non striker in a cricket match, silver is quiet and watching gold going berserk. 

So, this is what gold is telling silver right now,: 

Oh how fleet footed art thou,

Racing away to glory; 

After fifty years, you wake up,

Wanting to make up for lost time! 

Meanwhile I will show I'm no slouch,

And can't be held down either; 

I too will get up and race,

Though you may be swifter! 

Together we will decimate,

The fiction that is called Fiat; 

Not for nothing are we known, 

For grinding illusions to dust! 

Eternal store of value, 

Ancient preservers of wealth; 

Our time has come once more come, 

It is time for the great reset! 

Dinesh Gopalan,

21 January, 2026

SILVER BREAKS

The US mint has just suspended its sale of silver coins. This means the government has lost control and is panicking. 

The price has reached 92 dollars per ounce, spot, in the COMEX. I am sorry folks, I can only think in dollars per ounce now, ever since I woke up and started tracking the silver story in September. 

There is a massive supply shortage of physical silver all over the world. In the US, the premiums at the coin shops are above ten dollars. Many shops are reporting stockouts. 

In Shanghai, the closing price yesterday on the Shanghai Gold exchange was 101 dollars. The SGE is the real market where silver is traded physically and that price is the real price. 

Meanwhile, all the factors that we have been talking about that made silver reach here ( 30 percent gain since Jan 1st alone, it was at 50 dollar levels in September) are still intact. Here is the link to my blog post of 2nd December listing out those factors: 

https://www.dineshgopalan.com/2025/12/silver-moves.html?m=0

Conventional economics tells us that when the price of something rises, demand drops. Well, forget your conventional economics. Watch the panic that unfolds now. 

If you are holding silver, don't sell. Don't don't make the mistake of "booking profits", "take something off the table", "reduce the risk" or any of those reasonable sounding anodynes meant for conventional times. These are not conventional times. 

Should you buy at 92? I think yes, but thankfully I am sitting on silver that I bought in September at 50 dollar levels and don't have to take that call at this time when prices have run up so furiously. 

There is still some supply in the Indian market, and surprisingly, there is no street premium. If you are holding silver only in the form of ETF, you may want to consider converting part of your holdings into physical silver. 

Happy Pongal! 

Changing world, re-evaluating investment strategies

The best investment for the next few years: Gold 

High beta investment for the immediate future: silver

The dark horse: Platinum

To be wary about: equity. It is likely US will collapse first, we may still have time to bail before ours does

Commodity super cycle is here. Keep watching for the right time to shift to Commodity stocks. 

 Debt / fixed income products are for liquidity. They are not necessarily investments especially in a situation like today with high global debt to GDP ratios, and increasing geo political tensions. In such a scenario, any assets, including dal, atta and chaval, are better than holding cash. This includes real estate, precious metals, and equity.

Prepare for action in the silver market

If you are into any derivatives position on silver, long or short, exit immediately. Book a loss if you need to, but exit. Do not get into any paper contract in silver. This applies to both US and India. 

If you are in the US, and If you have any investments in silver ETFs, liquidate, and buy physical. 

The underlying of the  US ETFs are suspect. They may not be holding physical at all. 

Indian ETFs are reasonably safe. There is reason to believe that they hold physical.  However, if you can shift to physical, do it. 

If you think the silver market saw a lot of action in 2025, well, you ain't seen nothing yet. 2026 is going to be explosive. 

And yes, it's still a good time to buy. But if you want to buy, do it soon. 

STORE OF VALUE

For decades we have been fed this story about gold…They keep saying, it is not a "productive asset", it has no utility, it just sits there doing nothing, what is the return you are earning on it, etc., etc.

 

Well, what is money then? It is just a promise that someone will pay you something of value. Correction, it used to be a promissory note to pay something of value, back in the days when money was backed by gold. After the US went off the gold standard in 1971 and the rest of the world followed, that is no longer the case. It is just a promissory note. Promising what? Read what is printed on your currency note, it says "I promise to pay the bearer the sum of rupees __". Huh? Promise on the currency note to pay me in currency? That is circular logic!

 

A currency note is a piece of paper that people are compelled to accept in return for their goods or services, that is enforced forcefully by law and held together by convention and faith.

 

Do you know that in international trade no one trusts each other's currency? All international trade is therefore denominated by, and translated through, US dollars. How foolish. The US dollar is nothing but a fiat currency and other countries have at last woken up. Alternate "currencies" or payment mechanisms are being discussed.

 

What will be the basis of these currencies, the hard bedrock on which they are anchored? You guessed it, gold! While they have been feeding you stories about gold not being valuable, etc, etc, they have been quietly buying gold themselves. Central Banks across the world are the largest buyers and hoarders of gold!

 

Why gold? Money serves as a medium of exchange and a unit of measure. But most important, for it to be trusted, it needs to be a store of value, that is, it must retain its value over time. Which element on the periodic table suits these purposes well? The element needs to be scarce, but not impossible to obtain; it needs to cost something to extract; it cannot dissolve or dissipate like all gases do; it cannot be poisonous; it should be easy to carry and store; it should be malleable and ductile, capable of being minted into coins; it should not react easily with other elements; it should be virtually indestructible; it needs to be culturally and socially acceptable to everyone around the world… Gold it is! Closely followed by silver!

 

Every year, about 3000 to 3600 tons of gold is mined. Roughly 216,000 tons of gold is the above ground stock. This stock when melted and cast into a cube will measure 17 metres long, 17 metres wide, and 17 metres deep. That's it! Les than your average office building! Most of this gold is in the form of jewelry, or stored as investment in the form of bullion bars.

 

In case of silver, roughly 30,000 tons is mined every year. Estimates of above ground stocks vary, it could be anywhere between 600,000 tons to 1.6 million tons. It is estimated that all the silver ever mined is about 1.7 million tons. However, there is one problem when it comes to silver. A lot of it is used up in industrial applications, and a lot of it, more than 60 percent for sure, is not recovered, and just goes into landfills. We can safely estimate that all the silver available above ground today, is say, about 1 million tons, or, five times the amount of gold.

 

The ratio of gold to silver in terms of annual production is about 8:1. The historical ratio used for currency purposes for much of human history is 15:1. Currently, silver is severely underpriced, the ratio is around 60:1.

 

If you want an enduring store of value, money that you can pass on to the next generation, and the next, and so on, look no further than gold or silver. When it comes to Indians, you don't need to work too hard to convince them on this point – Indians have historically been consumers of gold and silver for this very reason, that it is a store of value.

 

Remember you past, reclaim your legacy, protect your wealth, include gold and silver in your portfolio! How much, what percent? Well, the current global, economic and monetary situation in relation to these two metals and to alternate investment avenues, suggests going overweight on gold and silver.

 

Happy New Year folks, have a great 2026!

 

Dinesh Gopalan,

1 January, 2026.

 

Posted to my blog https:\\www.dineshgopalan.com