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.
Most of the influencers aren't even in on the investment, they just get paid to pump, and a lot of them don't even get paid, they just do it for the eye balls.
People want to get rich quick.
There's going to be a never ending list of people that will tell them how - just so they can get useless karma points on Social Media, even if they don't make any money, and just convince you to lose your money.
> a never ending list of people that will tell them how
you mean like these trading Bros parachuting onto a yacht and placing a trade and telling me that I could do this too with the correct mindset from their exclusive Telegram group?
True, but 30% is a pretty dramatic change for one day. If you look at the history of the silver price - go back as far as you like - you won't find many days when it moves 30% in either direction.
Is it the beginning of a longer-term down? I have no idea.
It reminds me of my days looking at biotech stocks. You'd have a small company stake their whole financial future on the outcome of a clinical trial, to know whether their drug works or not. Leading up to the release of the results, the price would veer this way or that based on tidbits cleaned from doctors involved in the trials or whatever, but the stock would mostly be in a superposition of the two universes, one where it succeeds and one where it fails (or more mundanely: the probability weighted average of the price that the stock would be in each one). Then the results would come out and the universes would collapse to the "works" or "doesn't work" one and the stock would jump 30% or crater 50% or whatever.
I haven't been following this gold and silver saga, but it feels like a similar situation where there were two possible Fed appointees who would have vastly different impacts on the price of the metals. Then the announcement comes and the price found the world where that was the nominee and not the other guy.
Gold has been going up for years now. I don’t know how much TikTok influencers influence the price. Seems to be mostly central banks and the falling apart of the international order that’s driving a neutral and unsanctionable tradeable asset up.
It is very hard to pump the metals. The markets for them are just too big. You'd need whole countries buying to make a dent. Miners are another story. Those can be pumped and dumped like any other stock.
The dump is proximately caused by Trump picking a normal Fed chairman. Nobody on TikTok has anything to do with that, they're just pumping everything because seeling out is their day job.
Gold mining dates back to ancient civilisations.
Our best estimates suggest that around 216,265 tonnes of gold have been mined throughout history.
Interestingly, about two-thirds of this gold has been extracted since 1950.
This massive increase in production has been due to advancements in mining technology and the discovery of new gold deposits.
Good question, I would say your guess is as good as mine, but looks like you have recent statistics !
Thanks for the information, it does look like realistic figures about as accurate as you can get.
I just accept that as much as possible gold has always been hoarded much more strongly than silver amounts having the same values at the time.
Enough to regard silver as a medium of exchange compared to gold as a store of value.
Gold is so tightly hoarded that I expect that there is more than one accumulation established centuries ago, that originally consisted entirely of ancient gold which is comingled with material from the 20th century and maybe newer by now.
It's also possible that before any human value was established for gold in prehistoric times, there might just have been untold megatons within reach as low-hanging fruit without need to do very much "mining" at all.
Of course cave men had no formal education but they were sapiens just like us and had plenty of progressive generations over thousands of years to shrewdly recognize the advantage of not telling anybody about "untold" amounts of anything when it's regarded as valuable. At least some of them anyway :)
And they sure had orders of magnitude more time to pursue economic interests and accumulate wealth before recorded history than there has been since then, no telling what they were keeping off the books when there weren't any books yet !
Edit: Not my downvote! Where did that come from? Corrective upvote now placed.
Spoiler: I did a few decades of exploration geophysics, some time working on the production circuit of the SuperPit, and part of a team that sold a global minerals intelligence database to Standard & Poor 16 or so years ago.
(No big deal, I'm just old and happen to have literally mapped uranium / copper / gold / et al. resources and reserves about the globe for clients in the past)
> there might just have been untold megatons within reach as low-hanging fruit
And yet the total amount of known gold in all of history is less than a quarter of a single megaton .. you're suggesting mega tonnes of gold from from before the Roman Rio Tinto mining days have lasted more than two thousand years stacked up as nuggets in many many many caves and structures without being found.
That's an interesting hypothesis.
> Of course cave men had no formal education
Interestingly nor did my father (born 1935) and he's still walking about
> recognize the advantage of not telling anybody about "untold" amounts of anything when it's regarded as valuable.
Can you expand upon the value of megatons of gold to cavemen ?
> no telling what they were keeping off the books when there weren't any books yet !
Oh, you know, gravitometers, ground penetrating radar, seismic surveys, etc. are all means of exploring for things not yet on any ledger.
> Edit: Not my downvote!
I don't fuss much about those, not on my comments, and I see no reason to downvote yours - just ride it out, they mostly even out over time.
All of this is in light humour, your comment caught my eye as I wasn't sure if you were serious, jesting, hadn't thought through the physical implications of a perhaps throw away comment, etc.
Thanks even more for coming back and emphasizing your unique experience !
I think cave men are interesting because almost nothing is known about them.
Except that they were just like us.
If you go back far enough they could be in a cave lined with gold and not care about it at all.
Sooner or later though people coveted it so much they would kill for it. Maybe even Neanderthals too ;)
Meanwhile right there in Colorado there were many kilos of gold sitting at the bottom of a lonely river, still just waiting millennia for people to come along and gather it up. By the time settlers got there and were finished sifting out the gold, a whole city had been built on the spot, and Denver has been there ever since.
I would expect there were a lot more places like that which were never recorded, and by the point that biblical times got here had been tapped out and forgotten for millennia.
Sorry about seismics but my only exposure is from petroleum and I was not one of the geologists so not very involved.
But Trinidad is a major example where you didn't need subsurface imaging to find petroleum since there was so much of it floating on top of the water when foreign explorers arrived at the islands. Some people made plenty of money after its value was recognized from just the amount that was coming out of the ground by itself, before any drilling for the mother lode.
First come, first serve though. If an exorbitant amount can be controlled early it can provide an outsize hoard before anyone else has a comparable chance, and the relative advantage in financial strength so there is no threat to the accumulated wealth.
I would think that once gold was deemed desirable in prehistoric times, it didn't take that many more generations for some to appreciate the advantage of keeping the hoard together so they could retain more "critical mass" and power relative to adversaries.
When there is any adversarial situation, lots of times modern man didn't want anybody to really know the depth and type of their assets for strategic reasons. Other times they may have wanted the opposition to think they have way more resources than they actaully do. I guess plenty of people ever since have been no different, so anything is possible.
It's not just Tiktok, and not just the last few weeks. There have been pro-Gold ads in every form of media for the last couple of years, many focusing on uncertainty. The timing is pretty clear.
The 2024 election was a time of great uncertainty, and Trump's first year in power delivered a reality worse than the fears. Trump is still throwing random tariff threats (and actual tariffs) around without rhyme or reason, but he's discovered that threatening to invade (allied) countries can stir things up even more effectively. Choosing a lackey to replace a competent federal reserve chair isn't going to help matters. We're just one quarter of the way through Trump's presidency (assuming he lives and doesn't seek another term), and it seems like the uncertainty is just going to get worse.
However, that uncertainty is, by no means, certain. Domestic resistance and midterm elections could curb Trump's power. International resistance is starting to coalesce. e.g. The EU's threat to use their "trade bazooka" probably contributed to Trump's TACO on Greenland, as did the potential demise of NATO. Responses to Trump's international graspings will likely become more prompt and more muscular, reducing the instability Trump can cause. The system has been shocked, but now its adapting. Many nations are hedging against U.S. centred uncertainty by pivoting to China or other allies. Global markets will likely become more stable as nations learn how to work around Trump's chaos by working around the U.S.. Still, it's very possible that Trump will find new and "creative" ways to make everybody freak out again.
Bottom line, the uncertainty that's been driving gold prices up since 2024 is going to let up at some point. But when? How overvalued will gold be when it does let up?
Fortunately they would have to repeal the 22nd Amendment to allow that dingdong a third term
No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this Article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.
"Fed independence" has always been kind of a ruse. The theory is Congress would want to print money so they can spend it, so you need someone whose job it is to not do that. But then Congress just borrows the money instead, which forces the Fed to respond to keep interest rates where they want them, with the result that they still end up de facto printing trillions of dollars at the behest of Congress.
To some extent the "independence" is even worse, because the Fed has limited ways it can respond to what Congress does and "long-term cause individual debt to get completely out of hand" is one of their primary effects, which is pretty bad and plausibly worse than inflation having been slightly higher over the same period.
You essentially need someone with the structural incentive to limit excessive spending to be in a position to actually do that. In the original design that was the US Senate, because Senators were elected by the state legislatures who would then prefer programs to be implemented at the state level unless there was a reason to do them at the federal level. It's not a coincidence that the massive expansion of the federal government happened pretty much immediately after that was changed to make Senators directly elected.
Changing it back would probably work, but it's also a good example of the kind of thing that can work. You find someone whose incentive is to say no unless then answer should definitely actually be yes and you give them the ability to say no.
I have no idea about his credentials or suitability for the job, but Warsh is the son in law of Trump's buddy Ronald Lauder. I get the feeling he's not picking people he doesn't think he can control.
They're saying that the volume of the silver market is such that "tiktok influencers" and their followers (i.e. "retail" traders, not institutional investors or mega corporations hedging their supply chain) are insignificant in affecting the price. This is not a situation like bankrupt Gamestop.
I'm seeing the 30% price drop, e.g., here: https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/metals/precious/silver.volu..., which shows a volume of 300k contracts, where each contract is 5,000 ounces of silver, for a notional value of more than $100 BILLION dollars. Now, that much money didn't necessarily change hands but tiktokers and their followers are not going to realistically move the needle there still.
