Gold-Silver Ratio

Gold and silver usually move in the same direction, but rarely by the same amount. Silver is the smaller market and carries an industrial demand that gold doesn't, so it tends to overshoot gold on the way up and fall harder on the way down. When the two diverge, one of them is telling you something the other isn't, and the ratio is where that shows.

A rising ratio means gold is outperforming silver. That often goes with fear: a flight to the safest asset, or an industrial slowdown that hits silver's demand while gold's holds. A falling ratio means silver is catching up or overtaking, which often goes with a broad rally in the metals, industrial optimism, or a speculative run in silver. Neither direction is good or bad in itself; the ratio is context, not a signal.

Since 1970 the ratio has ranged from about 14 to just over 120. The low came on 2 January 1980, at the height of the Hunt brothers' attempt to corner the silver market, when silver's spike outran even gold's. The high came on 18 March 2020, in the pandemic panic, when both metals were sold for cash but silver, treated as an industrial metal, fell far harder.

Between those extremes, the median over the full period is around 63, and half of all trading days have fallen between roughly 46 and 75. The ratio spent the 1970s mostly in the 20s and 30s, climbed through the 1980s and 1990s, and has spent most of the last decade above 70. Where it sits against that history is worth knowing before reading anything into today's number.

Some investors use the ratio to decide which metal to hold: buying silver when the ratio is high on the theory it will fall back, and switching to gold when it's low. That's a strategy, not a law. The ratio has stayed above 80 for years at a stretch, and anyone who bought silver in 1991 at a ratio of 100 waited a long time for the reversion. The ratio tells you where the two metals are relative to their own history; it doesn't tell you when that changes.