Silver Could Stage Sharp Rally Soon

 | Jun 07, 2018 14:02

With much of the attention on Bitcoin becoming a potential replacement for gold (which we don’t agree with) silver has been almost forgotten. The grey precious metal has been trading inside a very narrow range with no clear directional bias for a very long time now. But there are a few reasons to be optimistic about silver’s outlook and we think that at some point in the near future it will break higher.

As global economic growth gathers pace, demand for industrial metals including silver should rise while the precious metal’s small safe haven appeal should prevent it from significant falls in the event of a stock market correction.

Buck-denominated silver also tends not to be impacted by the dollar’s volatility much compared with gold. In addition, the grey metal is holding support around a long-term technical level. Finally, in nominal terms, there is not much further that it could fall with the metal currently costing just $16-$17 per troy ounce.

Silver has been able to absorb much of the dollar’s strength we saw between February and May. While the Dollar Index has risen almost 7.7% from its February 16 low to its May 29 high, the buck-denominated grey precious metal has fallen just 3.6% during the same period.

While silver does still tend to correlate positively with the EUR/USD and negatively with the USD/JPY, its correlation is quite weak with both pairs and varies over time as shown in the table below.

Unsurprisingly, silver continues to correlate positively with the yellow metal, but even so the correlation over the longer period between 3-12 months has been quiet weak. Recent correlation between the two metals has been stronger, though. Meanwhile silver has actually managed to rise and fall in tandem with stocks, albeit very hesitantly as its weak positive correlation against the S&P 500 shows.

h3 Figure 1: Silver correlation coefficients as of 07/06/2018/h3