Gold Volatility Tops Silver's the Most Since 9/11
Wednesday, 5/14/2025 17:58
$100 days make gold jumpier than stocks, too...
ANOTHER week, another slug of $100 days in the gold price,
writes Adrian Ash at BullionVault.
Monday was $100 happier if you were buying...
...or $100 annoyed if you were selling...
...and with Wednesday coming close again, BullionVault users
keep doing plenty of both, just like they did last month.
Silver also saw heavy trading in April, and
also because of big price swings.
But while gold trading is still running strong, silver trading has eased back. And while historical data say that silver prices typically swing harder and faster than gold, that's not true right now.
In fact, our analysis of the statistics shows that gold is now jumpier than silver by the widest margin since the 2001 terror attacks of 9/11.
Volatility is the way that analysts measure how jumpy an asset's price is, or isn't.
High is bad, low is good. Or so investment managers think. Short-term traders like it the other way around. Because quicker moves make for fast money, if you call it right.
There's a number of ways to track volatility. Our statistics use the standard deviation maths (just like most such analysis does), crunching the size of the price swings for gold and silver, day-to-day, across every 21-day period (ie, one month of weekday trading).
That number is then spat out as an annualized percentage...
...and the blue line in BullionVault's chart above simply tracks the difference between gold's rolling 1-month volatility and the rolling 1-month vol in silver.
As you can see, gold is usually less volatile than silver. Much less volatile.
Over the past 6 decades in fact, gold has shown 16.2% volatility on average. For silver, the data averages out at 28.8%.
This is why silver, famously, is known as "the Devil's metal". It's likely to jump or plunge far more often than gold...
...crushing any short-term traders who think they can guess which way it's going to swing next, most especially if they're betting with leverage through futures and options or CFDs and spreads rather than spot-market cash prices.
But who's the Devil's metal now? Because over the past month, the price of gold has swung more violently than silver.
That's rare. Since April 1968, when open-market gold prices were cut free from the Dollar's official value of $35 per Troy ounce, gold has been more volatile than silver less than 9% of the time. And over the past 2 decades, that statistic falls to just 1.1% of the time.
Indeed, up until late last week, the Dollar-price data say that gold hadn't been more volatile than silver since mid-April 2022...
...immediate aftermath of Russia starting its 'special operation' to invade Ukraine.
Back then, gold out-freaked silver by just 1.7 percentage points. Whereas this Monday, gold's 1-month volatility reached 12.0 percentage points above silver's if you track their London benchmark prices day-to-day.
That means gold has been out-freaking the Devil's metal by the widest margin since late-September 2001...
...immediate aftermath of Al Qaeda's 9/11 atrocities on New York and the Pentagon.
That terrible day coincided with gold prices finally finding their floor after a 2-decade bear market. (Lots of
other factors counted too, but it's
how history already likes to remember it.)
Today, in contrast, gold has been soaring to fresh record highs, swinging lower only to set fresh record highs yet again, before swooning below $3200 this Wednesday.
So has the past month's dramatic gold price action marked a blow-off top for the 'safe haven' metal?
Maybe. But gold's sudden skittishness shouldn't spook investors out of the precious metal, not by itself.
Compare gold to the stock market, for instance. Yes, gold is currently out-freaking the S&P500 index by a wide margin. Day-to-day over the past month, its volatility is a hefty 14.3 percentage points higher.
But over the past 5 years, gold has been less volatile than that major US stock index almost 2/3rds of the time...
...only out-pacing the stock market's volatility 37.3% of the time on our analysis of London 3pm vs. the New York close.
Silver, in contrast, has been more volatile than the S&P index nearly 9/10ths of the time (89.1% to be exact).
So while gold's sudden freak-out might give some newer investors the jitters, it's got a long way to go...plus a whole heap of history to overcome too...before it gets anywhere close to matching the volatility of the stock market, never mind silver prices.
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