Silver Investing Leaps Fastest Since Covid
Friday, 5/09/2025 15:04
Silver buyers +108% on price plunge...
SILVER INVESTING demand just leapt at its fastest pace since the Covid Crisis,
writes Adrian Ash at world-leading precious metals marketplace BullionVault.
The surge in demand came as
the price of silver − which finds more than half its end-use globally from industrial and tech applications, over five times the proportion for 'useless' safe haven gold − fell hard from new multi-year highs, only to rebound as US President Trump back-tracked on some of his 'Liberation Day' trade tariffs.
Across the first week of May, investors who had used BullionVault's live 24/7 marketplace to buy securely-stored
silver at early April's sudden 6-month lows would have been offered net gains of 15.9% (11.6% for UK Pound investors, 11.8% in Euro terms).
Those gains would have been impossible for anyone buying bullion, small bars or coins outside professional storage because of those 'retail' units carrying dealing spreads as wide as 10% plus VAT sales tax as high as 20% in the UK and Europe.
What drove April's surge in demand to invest in silver?
While gold prices had stolen the headlines with a run of new records in 2025, silver quietly rose to its highest Dollar prices since the global financial crisis, plus
fresh monthly silver price records in Euro and Sterling terms across February and March.
But US President Trump's shock 'Liberation Day' trade tariffs then sent silver prices reeling, spiking down like no time since the initial Covid Crash in world stock markets and commodities prices of March 2020.
With silver prices spiking lower, the number of investors who chose to buy silver across April more than doubled from March. It jumped 108.0% on BullionVault's low-cost platform to the most since March 2021.
The number of silver sellers meanwhile slipped 11.2% to the fewest since December last year. Together that sent the Silver Investor Index − BullionVault's unique measure of sentiment, calculated back to New Year 2012 − soaring by 7.5 points to 58.3.
That marks the highest reading in 49 months, thanks to the steepest month-on-month jump in the Silver Investor Index since March 2020's series-record rise of 20.4 points.
Any reading above 50.0 means that buyers outnumbered sellers across the month. The Silver Investor Index set a series peak at 75.1 as the Covid crisis first struck in March 2020, and it set a series low of 45.0 on March last year's record-heavy profit-taking.
What next? April's surge of silver investment demand hasn't yet run into May. That's because it came thanks to silver prices spiking lower, just as happened in spring 2020. And longer-term, this spike in silver demand also followed nearly 2.5 years of net selling when prices rose and investors took profit, with sellers outnumbering buyers ten times on the Silver Investor Index across the previous 29 months.
Silver investment by weight also leapt last month, totaling 17.8 tonnes net of customer selling. That was the heaviest 1-month buying since February 2021's net demand of 25.3 tonnes − an inflow driven by the
#silversqueeze ramp on social media.
This April's big silver inflow took BullionVault clients' total holdings − all securely stored and insured in each user's choice of London, Singapore, Toronto or (like gold, most popular) Zurich − up to a 7-month high above 1,160.5 tonnes.
That contrasts with gold, where
half-a-tonne of net selling last month shrank BullionVault clients' total holdings to the lowest quantity in almost 5 years, just beneath 43.8 tonnes, on the heaviest net liquidation since March 2024's record 1-tonne of gold profit-taking.
But by value, gold holdings set a fresh all-time high once again, rising to $4.6 billion (£3.4bn, €4.0bn). The drop in silver prices, in contrast, meant that the surge of investor demand still put client holdings 3.9% below March's record high in US Dollar terms, down at $1.2 billion (-6.9% in GBP to £900 million, -8.5% in EUR to €1.0bn).
Looking ahead, and whether or not the US-China trade war is resolved quickly, Trump's tariffs shock is likely to weigh on global trade and economic growth. The President's policies against green energy also present a headwind to silver, because the solar-energy sector worldwide has accounted for nearly two-thirds of the growth in total industrial demand to new record highs over the past decade.
So while it's driven long term by the same inflationary and geopolitical tensions as gold, the price of the gray metal is more vulnerable to economic anxiety, as well as enjoying long-term demand growth, because of
silver's strong industrial uses. That made silver 40% more volatile day-to-day last month than the safe haven metal, offering larger gains to short-term traders but also carrying more risk.
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