XAG/USD Spot Silver / United States Dollar

Interesting facts

Silver is another one of the precious metals and as such it attracts interest as a “safe-haven” investment. However, since silver tends to benefit from stronger physical, industrial and monetary demand than gold, it will usually perform closer to the movements of other “high beta” assets (equities for example) then gold. Thus, silver will usually outperform gold when the overall economic outlook is bullish, but is also likely to suffer greater setbacks when the market turns bearish. As such, the relationship between silver and gold can be a proxy for ‘risk’ overall, expressed by the gold/silver ratio – A lower ratio promotes risk seeking and a higher ratio suggests risk aversion.

Price drivers

The price of Silver is driven by many of the same factors as Gold – Rate of inflation and inflation expectations, global GDP growth, and interest rates as well as the monetary policies of some of the larger central banks in the world – US Fed, European Central Bank, Bank of England, Bank of Japan and the People’s Bank of China. To a certain extent, supply/demand factors tend to play a greater role in silver’s price fluctuations than in gold’s due to its comparative lack of market liquidity. Lastly, market sentiment plays a major role in the price of the “poor-man’s-gold”, thus silver traders will want to keep a close eye on consumer confidence data as well as the movements in many of the global bond and equity markets.