Precious Metals Sector Update – Where’s Waldo?
Excelsior Prosperity w/ Shad Marquitz (06-22-2025)
“Where's Wally? (called Where's Waldo? in North America) is a series of children's puzzle books created by English illustrator Martin Handford.”
The books consist of a series of detailed double-page spread illustrations depicting dozens or more people doing a variety of amusing things at a given location.
Readers are challenged to find a character named Wally (or Waldo) and his friends hidden throughout the pages.
Wally is identified by his red-and-white-striped shirt, bobble hat, and glasses, but many illustrations contain red herrings involving deceptive use of red-and-white striped objects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where%27s_Wally%3F
{Click on the image above to expand it and find Waldo}
For those familiar with this artistic puzzle book series, the idea was to look across a page of random art images and to distinguish where the small Waldo character was embedded amongst all the visual congestion.
This is our same job as investors parsing through all the market noise to distinguish the actual signal and the key catalysts that will move a said asset class;
… only, it is not ever as simple as just finding the one “Waldo.”
There is not a singular fundamental factor one can point to that has moved the oil, or copper, or uranium, or gold, or silver prices over the years.
There is rarely a singular reason moving any market over medium to longer-term time periods, be it tech stocks, real estate, bonds, or commodities.
I personally love investing in the precious metals sector, but am fully cognizant that the drivers for the monetary asset of gold are unique, complex in nature, and not really the same factors that may affect silver and the PM stocks. In fact, some of the factors that may be a boon for gold, may hurt silver or the PM stocks in the short-term. Some of the factors that may boost silver or the PM stocks, may end up being shrugged off by gold or even be a negative factor for it.
A financial concern or bad economic data point, may end up giving gold a boost as a safe haven or financial chaos hedge, but those factors may hit silver or PM equities in a negative sense.
A geopolitical concern may give the yellow metal a boost, but take down silver or the PM stocks in a selling event.
Central banks buy gold, but they don’t buy silver or the PM stocks.
Basell III making gold a Tier 1 asset for banks to hold in their reserves doesn’t mean anything for silver or PM stocks.
People in another country may hedge against falling purchasing power, or rapid inflation, by diversifying their fiat currency into gold, but they would be unlikely to diversify in to PM stocks or even silver to the same degree.
If there is positive outlook on the US economy, or Chinese economy, or European economy, that may actually hurt gold’s luster, but it simultaneously may boost silver’s appeal or the interest in PM stocks with good growth on tap.
If demand models for solar power adoption go higher, then that can be a nice fundamental factor for silver, but it won’t mean much of anything to gold.
The demand for more electronics or more EVs in a booming economy may be a tailwind for silver, but a headwind to gold.
Having said all that, people speculating on the future silver price or gold or silver stocks are still looking for a way to get a leveraged call option or multiplier effect on the price of gold.
The question always comes up though: What is causing the price of gold to go up or down?
Where’s that Waldo (catalyst) for gold?
We hear or read a steady stream of ever-changing reasons and explanations as to what is moving gold. While some will definitely proclaim it is one primary Waldo, (ie…interest rates, the dollar, Fed policy, monetary supply, inverse to equities, etc…) it is never that simple, and is a web of interconnected reasons all creating a market.
Some pundits will cite a pet macroeconomic perspective and suggest that a particular XYZ issue is why gold is moving up over the last year, quarter, month, week, etc… We’ve heard all that matters is what happens with the 10-year yield, or the spread between the 2-year and 10-year yield, or the steepening of the yield curve. Then we’ve heard gold is just tracking the M2 money supply expansion. We’ve heard it’s simply the inverse of the trend in the US dollar. Others claim it’s the recognition of the huge debt levels that the US is carrying. Others gold-colored glasses come down to viewing everything based on whether the Fed is going to hike or cut rates. Some claim it’s all about negative real rates, or inflation trends, or what is happening to the Yen carry trade, and on and on…
Some other seemingly well-informed pundits will get on a financial news show or podcasts or they’ll pen numerous articles unpacking why the move higher in gold is all because of geopolitics: It’s the war in Ukraine, it’s the war with Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, or the resurging conflict with Israel and Iran, or in the past it was due to Brexit, or the Swiss unpegging the Franc from the dollar, or it was due to concerns about the Panama Canal and global trade, or it’s what is happening at this year’s BRICS summit, or it’s because of kicking Russia off the Swift banking system, or it’s Trump’s tariffs interrupting global trade. Geopolitics provides constant potential reasons to point to as to why gold is going up or down, but those rarely come close to truly explaining the pricing dynamics and each reason is as fleeting as the next.
Then other groups of die-hard metals enthusiasts will suggest it comes down to the fundamentals of the physical markets, and cite traditional economic ideas that gold prices hinge around its supply/demand setup of the commodity demand versus the mined and recycled above-ground supply coming to market. Of course, this comes with the obligatory comments that all this remains obscured by the evil paper markets covering this up. So then, by that same rationale, prices clearly are not set by the actual supply/demand factors of gold or silver, and actually are set in the paper markets. We all wish it wasn’t that way.
Then there are thoses constantly trying to read the tea leaves with regards to the Commitment Of Traders (COT) reports and ascertain potential turning points by looking at open interest in futures contracts, for the shorts versus the longs, between the commercials and speculators. It is interesting data for looking at imbalances at extremes, but rarely is causative for pricing in and of itself.
Then yet even other groups of savvy technical analysts will look at gold’s moves strictly through the lens of pricing approaching and then breaking through or holding at key support and resistance levels. Of course, throw a dozen technical analysts in a room looking at a chart, and none of them will come to the same conclusions of where support and resistance come in or where the targets are.
Which one of these groups are right? Where’s Waldo?
Personally, I didn’t really get animated by the precious metals sector until 2008-2009 and The Great Financial Crisis. The fundamental reasons at that time were that we were told repeatedly that the financial markets were done for and we had reached the point where the whole system was going to collapse in a derivative implosion. Gold was still considered the ultimate safe haven and store of value, and didn’t have 3rd-party risk; so that was why it was rallying strongest out of the gates from 2009-2011.
Since that time period at the tail-end of the prior cycle from 2001-2011, we’ve seen a roller coaster in prices where gold went into a cyclical bear market from September of 2011 through the very end of 2015.
Gold then put in a “major low” in December of 2015 @ $1045.40, marking the end of the bear market, and then it began the new bull market; which has run through present time for about a decade now.
Since that December 2015 “Major Low,” (where it quit going down and making new lows, which is what is required to be in a bear market, and instead it started climbing to higher levels… ie a bull market) gold has more than tripled from $1045.40 to the close this last Friday at $3,385.70.
During this 3x move in gold prices, we’ve heard an endless stream of reasons as to why gold was moving higher again.
Initially in December of 2015 the reason was due to the coming Fed rate hikes
Then it was due to the excessive fiscal policies from multiple administrations, creating a debt imbalance that was mathematically impossible to repay. People buying gold knew we couldn’t just keep raising the debt ceiling, and so it was the recognition of the untenable amount of US debt that was causing gold to go higher.
It’s interesting that during periods where gold corrects downwards for quarters or years that all that sovereign debt is still growing out there, but apparently people aren’t concerned about this debt devastation coming during those time periods. (one can see the flawed logic here where apparently the debt concerns only matter to investors causing them to buy gold during the bullish periods but ignore it during bearish periods)
Then it was Bernanke’s & Yellen’s excessive helicopter money from the FED and consistent loose monetary policies. Yes, that played a factor but it’s a global market and there plenty of other central banks tinkering and interfering.
Many pundits proclaimed it was all about the interest rates and in continuing to be stuck in negative real rates, when one factored in inflation versus bond yields.
Then real rates turned positive and yet gold kept going higher and actually accelerated to the upside… It turned out that the accepted narratives kept breaking down, as positive real rates were supposed to hurt gold prices.
Then it became currency narratives around the Japanese Yen, and then the Euro/US Dollar currency pairs. Gold was sniffing these out… or was it?
Many claimed it was the inverse direction of the US dollar price movements, but they started trading in tandem for big stretches, and even those correlations broke down over the years. They don’t always move in an inverse fashion.
At one point it was the reaction to the Pandemic Crash shock, and global lockdowns interrupting supply chains and global trade, where the yellow metal had moved back in as a safe haven in the spring and summer of 2020.
Then just 1-2 years later, gold was no longer a safe haven or inflation hedge, and it was the mega-cap tech stocks were the new safe havens. Gold was back to being nothing more than a “barbarous relic” and “boomer rock,” and it was clearly dead money and had already been supplanted by Bitcoin as Gold 2.0. Real value, we were told by the market that is “always right,” was in NFTs, meme stocks, SPACs, IPO Unicorns, and FinTech… until those all peaked out in 2021 and then fell to become mostly worthless…
Then gold briefly flip-flopped to again being a safe haven against the geopolitical uncertainties of the start of the 2022 Ukraine War w/ Russia. This was short lived though, and after a few months as the fighting and conflict actually intensified, gold kept selling off and traders apparently no longer needed a safe haven. Oh really, so where did all that geopolitical “war premium” suddenly go then if the war was actually intensifying in size and scope and damage?
Then the narrative shifted again, to US exceptionalism being the reason for gold’s weakness. The US stock market rallies signified that the coast was clear for economic growth, and with interest rates rising, then there would not be a bid for gold. Besides, it was no longer needed and wasn’t a good inflation hedge. Remember?
Then gold started rising higher despite the high interest rates and stronger dollar, and despite the strength of the US stock indexes, flying in the face of all those narratives and correlations. Gotta love it!
Gold even went higher (once again) in the face of positive real rates, which wasn’t supposed to happen… so it left many economists scratching their heads on mainstream media outlets about why gold was moving up. Where’s Waldo?
Some pundits proclaimed it was the behind-the-scenes anticipation of the BRICS countries plans to launch a gold-backed currency and dethrone the King Dollar. There were going to be SDRs in this new currency… maybe… still waiting on it.
Others proclaimed that billionaires and bankers were front-running the move Gold was going to make after being granted Tier 1 status as a monetary reserve asset soon. Then gold sold down for a period, so I guess then they suddenly weren’t front running this new status coming for gold. Curious eh?
These macro disconnects were all explained away with the new reality that it was central banks buying record amounts of gold the last few years. So, with their steady bid under the surface, that was causing all the prior macro correlations to break down fundamentally. A convenient narrative to escape simply being wrong.
All other accepted theories could now be conveniently tossed out the window, because it was the central bank heroes, riding in on white horses, that were the real reason for gold’s ascent (interest rates, and positive inflation-adjusted real rates, and the US dollar strength, and US equities correlations be damned…)
The narrative then shifted to shunning the macro… People trying to figure out macroeconomic signals were kidding themselves and consistently off-course and lost in the weeds. Everybody knew it was all about the technical picture and that we just needed to see gold make a new all-time high above $2089. Right?
Then during November & December 2023 gold made a new all-time high on the daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual charts. This means we saw legit breakouts all across the board on the charts technically, and those were actually the bells ringing that we were kicking off the next leg of this PM cycle.
However, since gold pulled back in January and February, then it meant that those technical achievements “didn’t really count” and most PM technicians didn’t feel like actually being… technical. Many otherwise smart technicians were not really acknowledging the significance of the breakouts that had just occurred, because they were followed by a couple of month of weakness as pricing consolidated. They should have gotten very bullish, but didn’t.
Instead, many technicians moved the goal posts once again, and said that end of 2023 technical action was nice, but now we really needed a definitive price close above $2,100 with some gusto.
Then in March of 2024 we saw that move above $2,100 in both the futures and this time also in spot prices for gold. This was the supposed to be the trigger point to see all the generalists wake up to gold making new highs and then see all that buying come flooding into all the gold stocks…. Only, that isn’t what happened.
To be fair, there was some reaction in the quality gold companies, but it was not a big influx of outside buying. Even at $2,200, $2,300, $2,400, $2,500, $2,600 it wasn’t really the epic bull market move in the gold stocks that people had been anticipating.
We kept hearing that it was only going to take most people going from 0% or 1% allocations up to 2% allocations, and then all that incoming money would create a rising tide that lifts all boats. We’re apparently still waiting on that to happen…
There was also surprisingly little conversation about gold’s continuous string of all-time high record closes in the financial media, because the US equities and cryptos were also racing to new all-time highs and stealing the spotlight. So much for these markets needing to be inversely correlated.
Of course, the top callers came out of the woodwork all the way up at $2,200, $2,300, $2,400, $2,500, $2,600, $2,700, $2,800, and $2,900… but gold just kept plowing higher and higher without much of a pullback.
To the chagrin of all the top callers, technicians banging on about the overbought levels, and the ever-present PM permabears… gold still blasted up to $2900 with hardly any meaningful corrections.
Then Trump won the election in November, and this was going to be good for US growth, the economy, and the cryptoverse.
As a result, the stock markets and cryptos surged higher, and gold and the PM sector crashed lower in November and December of 2024. Those inverse correlations were suddenly back in vogue. Now, nobody needed PMs… Right?
Then we turned over the annual page of the calendar into 2025, and the general markets started correcting in Q1 of this year. The realizations set in that stock valuations had gotten way ahead of themselves and were priced for perfection.
Investors that had gotten way over their skis were suddenly concerned with the DOGE budget cuts and government job layoffs, so uber-bearish outlooks on the US economy surfaced. Where were the Waldo’s to keep pushing US markets higher?
Gold ignored all the other market sectors, dancing to the beat of its own drum, and blasted up through $3,000 as the only true “safe haven.” Suddenly, it wasn’t a “boomer rock” any more and was back to being the store of value it has been for thousands of years now. People were surprised… but is that really surprising?
👉 It’s worth pointing out that people had been convinced that if the US equities dropped that PM stocks would be sucked down with everything else… (after all, people love to parrot the line: Gold and silver stocks are still stocks… Right?)
The reality is that gold, silver, and the PM stocks did diverge from US equities, and from bonds, and were the top-performing assets in Q1 of this year.
The tired trope of “gold and silver stocks are still stocks and therefore would correct with all other stocks” died on the vine as just another false narrative.
Gold shot up to $3,100, $3,200, and $3,300; with people calling for pullbacks to $2,800 or $2,900 the whole way higher that never manifested on the charts.
So, then their narratives shifted to… “Well, the PM sector would have crashed along with the general markets if it wasn’t for all those central banks that kept buying…”
Apparently it escaped them that the central banks weren’t buying silver nor gold or silver stocks, and yet they were all getting some life in them even when most other equities were crashing. This means that there was much more to the story that just a single explanation, and there was buying across the PM complex.
Even though there has legitimately been a lot of central bank buying, the gold market, especially the futures market, (which is where the pricing is set), is FAR more complex than just taking into account the quantities of physical gold that central banks have been buying. People just crave simple singular explanations.
We’ve seen PLENTY of buying from citizens in China, in India, in Europe, in the Middle East, and even in the US and Canada. Physically backed ETFs had inflows.
The narrative then emerged that gold was moving over to the East, where the prime benchmark would be the Shanghai market close, and people would de-emphasize the London fix, and the Comex close in the US. We saw big arbitrage trades with money leaving the West to head to the East for the higher valuations.
There is likely something to this notion of the gradual shift in focus for the gold market from London, New York, and Chicago over to Shanghai, but again that will simply be a nuanced contributing factor and not really the prime factor.
Then months later the narrative shifted again and became: “Gold is going from London to the USA, because everyone is trying to get in front of the potential tariffs.” Wait a minute, what happened to the gold leaving the West and heading East?
The narrative shifted to institutions, family offices, and high-net-worth individuals needed to get all their gold repatriated, so they would not have to pay 25% tariffs on it. (again, apparently it escaped people’s logic that there were never 25% tariffs proposed on either gold or silver… but that didn’t matter for the narrative to still take hold).
Then the Liberation Day tariff tantrums did hit the markets in early April 2025, when the tariffs were announced at 10% instead of 25%. There was nowhere to hide in any market against the assured end of the world and global trade…. so gold and silver and PM stocks got hit along with everything else as the recession and next great depression had surely arrived. Right? (nope)
Then 2-3 weeks later, after a huge V-shaped recovery in almost all markets, all of those concerns suddenly evaporated as we had a pause in tariffs. It turned out that maybe the sun would come out tomorrow and the world would keep spinning regardless of the sky-is-falling rhetoric just a couple weeks previous to that.
Gold then shot up to $3,400, and even briefly above $3,500 in April, just a few weeks after the rally was declared over. Almost nobody was calling for that move to yet even higher all-time highs… and there wasn’t even a good narrative that emerged for it. (It must be those pesky central banks buying right?) Nope…
The new narrative that emerged was that this was because of the “Sell America trade” where all the foreign investors want out of US dollar denominated assets and so they are selling stocks, bonds, and getting out of dollars to buy gold.
Others not sure of that narrative, spun a different one.. that this move even higher in gold was happening because of updates to Basel III laws, and that gold finally was granted that Tier 1 reserve status. Out came the “I told you so” narratives that this was the REAL reason why gold would be at $5,000 next month…
Then gold started to correct, because the general stocks markets were back in the leadership position, and the rationale in financial media was that traders were pulling profits on the gold trade.
Oh really, well what in the world happened to the “Sell America” trade? Had they all collectively decided to “Buy America” 3 weeks later?
Didn’t people “in the know” still want to keep positioning in front of the wave of regular banks that were going to buy massive amounts of gold now due to the Basel III changes?
It is always humorous how bullish narrative logic completely unravels during corrective moves back lower again.
Strangely, even while the gold prices were channeling sideways to down the last couple months, many gold and silver stocks started ratcheting higher in May and June, along with silver, and this was dubbed “the catchup trade.”
Clearly different forces and motivations for buying exist in gold versus the rest of the complex.
Silver and the silver stocks rallying didn’t even seem to have a cohesive narrative around it, and sometimes there just doesn’t need to be one. Sometimes, buying momentum just leads to more buying momentum.
Some claimed it was the overdue balancing of the gold:silver ratio after being at extremes. Sure, that may be a factor, but why now? The ratio had been stretched in the 90s or even over 100 for a while and didn’t balance out, so what was the impetus for it to start resolving in favor of silver in May and June?
Now we have yet another conflict with Israel and Iran, and so clearly the higher prices in the PMs are going to be solely due to a war premium… Right?
Lower PM prices will be due to concerns that the US economy will falter if facing the costs of a new war, especially considering the debt load already being carried…. Right?
If the metals prices run, then it will be socially unpalatable to be encouraged by higher gold prices, because it is on the back of conflict. You can’t point out that the insurance product is paying off and doing its job.
It’s curious though as to why gold prices have been at these same levels for months before the war even started? How much of this current price is due to the war premium that just escalated the last 2 weeks then?
If the metals prices fall, then it will be socially palatable to rip on the US foreign policy and forecast a dire economic contraction on the horizon due to the war.
As one can ascertain… these narratives are never going to stop. We’ll have a dozen more narratives about what the catalyst is to drive gold, silver, and the PM stocks higher over the next 2 years.
Here’s the reality… There is no Waldo.
There is NOT a singular reason for gold’s climb higher by 335% since December 2015 at $1045.40 to $3,509 in April 2025.
The reason I just belabored the point of going through all the different narratives for gold, silver, and PM stocks, was to show how complex, fluid, and multi-faceted these global markets are in reality. There is never just one factor or reason for markets to move, and especially ones as complex as gold or silver.
With those points in mind, let’s have a look at how the leveraged versions of gold have performed; meaning gold stocks, silver, and silver stocks.
We read and hear all the time that the gold stocks have not kept up with the moves in gold. Well, let’s inspect that claim with hard data from the pricing charts.
Below is a chart of the GDX showing it’s 9+ year move in the bull market, ever since gold stocks bottomed in January of 2016 through present.
From the January 2016 low of $12.40 (GDX) has risen by 441% to hit that recent peak at 54.70 last week in June of 2025.
This means that not only did GDX keep pace with Gold, but its 441% gain outperformed gold’s 335% move. So it is simply untrue factually to say that gold stocks didn’t keep up with the move in gold.
What would be more accurate to claim is that the gold stocks didn’t leverage gold’s move on a 3:1 ratio like we’ve seen in other cycles. THIS is what has PM investors upset.
Also, from a junior gold stock perspective, as a collective group, they’ve not performed nearly as well as the senior producers. So while many of them have underperformed the move higher in gold over the last decade, many of them also don’t have much gold.
This shouldn’t be a surprise, because the smaller junior drill plays and prospect generators and early-stage developers can not immediately monetize the higher prices like the producers, royalty companies, and best-in-class derisked developers can. That is where the real pain and sour sentiment still exists under the surface for many PM investors and their portfolio underperformance the last couple of years.
Now let’s turn to silver. It’s a bit messier price journey on the 10-year daily chart below.
Silver hit a low of $13.62 back in December of 2015. That was the Major Low for a few years; until it actually fell to an even lower level on the pandemic crash of March 2020 down to $11.64. Since that was short-lived and an global exogenous event, some would argue it never would have dropped there without that backdrop and discount it. From a charting perspective, you really should count all pricing data as it comes (without attaching a narrative to it).
So depending on which point one wants to use to measure from, up to the recent peak on silver futures of $37.40 the week of June 16th, then you’d have seen either a 274% or 321% increase in silver from troughs to peak. That is slightly less of a gain than gold, but certainly not outperformance of silver over gold.
It is important to note that we don’t normally see outperformance of silver over gold for the entire stretch of PM bull markets, and it often comes in with a catchup trade over shorter time-durations. Silver will vastly outperform in bursts, and those bursts usually come later in the bull market, so we may be on the precipice of those moves in the next 12-18 months.
We’ve seen the gold:silver ratio get over 100 a few times over this time bull market, leading many to believe that we’ve not even been in a bull market for silver, or at least with the perspective that still has a lot more catch up to do versus it’s the yellow metal.
Moves up of 274% higher in a decade or 321% in 5 years is a bull market any way you slice it, and definitely not a bear market.
The other point to keep in mind is that in the markets there are no guarantees. Gold and silver are different assets, with different fundamental drivers, different attributes and roles in the financial and industrial sectors, and also different technical setups on their respective charts.
There is no singular “Where’s Waldo” reason that silver has to go up to the same degree that gold does, or that is has to go up on a much larger percentage basis. It has in the past, but the past does not equal the future.
Now let’s have a look at the silver stocks by way of the ETF (SIL).
If we do an apples-to-apples comparison of the same time period from the January 2016 “Major Low” in (SIL) at $14.94 to the recent peak of $49.76, then we’ve seen a 330% increase, which is almost identical to gold’s move, and a slightly better than silver’s move
The odds of an investor having purchased silver stocks in January of 2016 and just held them taking no evasive action or without making any trades for the last decade is very unlikely though. Most investors have traded the silver stocks over the last decade, and rightly so. This has not been a buy and hold sector, and that is not how commodities work anyway, because they are cyclical and sporadic.
We can see that there were shorter-duration periods of comparable gains in the (SIL); like the 2016 surge for a 364% gain, the 2020 recovery rally for a 330% gain, or the run from late 2022 to present for a 234% gain from troughs to peaks.
As we’ve noted in other articles: It is strange that silver has been up above $35 resistance, at $36 and $37, levels much higher than in 2016 or 2020, and yet the silver stocks inside the (SIL) have been unable to achieve higher pricing peaks.
So, what can we take away from all of this?
There is never going to be a single catalyst or driver of any commodity, especially ones with market factors as dynamic as gold and silver.
When people proclaim that the primary driver of gold or silver is (XYZ), always take that with a huge grain of salt…
People should spend less time trying to find that silver bullet by which to understand these markets. Quit wanting what you don’t want.
There is no Waldo to find that will make the whole picture come into focus.
Thanks for reading and may you have prosperity in your trading and in life!
Shad
