Chart Of The Day: Silver Tarnished On Fading Economic Recovery Hopes

 | Aug 18, 2021 14:28

With worried investors pivoting into safe haven assets, lifting gold, it's a bit of a surprise that silver has been underperforming.

Risk assets such as stocks have been struggling since Monday, as escalating COVID cases worldwide and the economic shutdowns triggered by the pandemic boost fears that the post-pandemic recovery is ending. That pessimistic view was bolstered on Tuesday after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said, in a town hall broadcast, that even the central bank's “powerful tools” are limited, and asserted that the pandemic will remain “for a while,” meaning the economy won't return anytime soon to what it was before the pandemic.

After Powell's remarks, only defensive sectors such as Utilities and Consumer Staples finished the day in the green. And just barely at that.

This paradigm, in which defensive shares outperform, is now occuring even on a weekly basis, indicating that market participants believe an economic restart could be much further away than what was previously hoped for. And silver, a precious metal that's also strongly tied to industrial usage—in batteries, alloys, semiconductors and solar energy among many other applications—is languishing as Industrials slump.

Though silver has rallied slightly, technicals are indicating this isn't going to last long. The white metal is set to return to its underlying downtrend.