Silver traders: Welcome to your meme-stock moment.
After posting the strongest year on record going back to at least 1979, silver prices have continued their rapid climb in January. On Monday, the price of the most-active futures contract SI00 gained 14% through daily settlement, marking the best day for the white metal since March 19, 1985, Dow Jones Market Data showed.
This was only the latest chapter in what has been one of the biggest stories in markets over the past year. During that time, prices for gold GC00, silver, platinum PL00 and palladium PA00 have taken off — but none have risen as far, or as fast, as silver.
Read: Silver finally hits $100 an ounce — and some experts say that’s just the beginning
Since Jan. 1, 2025, silver futures have gained 230% on a continuous basis, FactSet data showed. Trading volume in popular silver exchange-traded funds, and options contracts tied to those ETFs, surged on Monday to the highest levels on record.
The two most-active equities in the entire U.S. market on Monday were two ETFs tied to the price of silver. The ProShares UltraShort Silver ETF ZSL was the most active, with nearly 800 million shares changing hands as investors rushed to bet that the rally would soon cool off.
In second place was the iShares Silver Trust SLV, with more than 377 million shares changing hands, according to preliminary numbers from Dow Jones Market Data.
To some, the price action and concurrent jump in trading volume was enough to suggest that the precious metal was trading like a meme stock. On X, at least one widely followed markets commentator said that their feed had been flooded with posts about silver.
Mike Antonelli, a market strategist at Baird, likened silver to GameStop Inc. GME, the original meme stock, in a post on X on Monday.
“How is silver different than, say, GameStop? Is this not a meme now?” he said in the post.
“Are there industrial uses for silver? Sure, of course. But nothing has changed about that in the past month to make the price go up 65%. We live in an investing world where, when things move quickly, everyone piles on at the same time. No barriers at all,” Antonelli continued.
Others said comparing silver to a meme stock wasn’t that much of a stretch. The white metal did get a taste of social-media-driven buzz back in early 2021, when the original meme-stock craze was still in full effect. Also, it has long had a sizable following among individual investors.
“It doesn’t share the ‘us vs. them’ dynamic that motivated much of the early meme-stock rush, but we do have a momentum-driven frenzy that appears to have blown past any prior perception of fundamentals and has captured the public’s imagination,” said Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers.
As silver’s rally has piqued individual investors’ interest, volume in popular silver-linked ETFs exploded on Monday to the highest levels on record, according to Dow Jones Market Data. The iShares Silver Trust, the Sprott Physical Silver Trust PSLV and ProShares UltraShort Silver were the three funds included in this analysis. Combined, they saw more than 1.2 billion shares change hands, according to preliminary data.
Options volume tied to the iShares Silver Trust ETF also hit record territory, with both calls and puts changing hands more quickly than ever before. More than 3.6 million call options changed hands on Monday, data showed. A call option gives the holder the right, but not the obligation, to buy a given asset at an agreed-upon price, known as the strike price. A put option gives the holder the right to sell the asset.
Social-media activity tied to silver has exploded as well, according to Tom Bruni, head of markets and retail investor insights at Stocktwits, a social-media platform focused on investing.
Weekly symbol page views for silver on Stocktwits have soared since late last month, hitting between 30 and 40 times the levels from last summer.
“We have not seen this level of retail interest in silver and precious metals in years, and I’d guess not since the last bull market ended in 2011,” he said.