Written by: Jin Shi Data

Marko Kolanovic, former chief strategist at JPMorgan, warned that silver prices could fall to half of their current levels by late 2026. Market views suggest that the current surge in silver prices is akin to the hype surrounding meme stocks.

Recently, prices for gold, silver, platinum, and palladium have soared, but no metal has risen as high and as fast as silver. After achieving its strongest annual performance since at least 1979 in 2025, silver prices have continued to climb rapidly this year, rising 54% to date. On Monday, during U.S. trading hours, spot silver skyrocketed to $117.4 per ounce before suddenly plummeting, shocking the market.

Trading Volume, Options, and Discussion Heat Explode Simultaneously

According to FactSet data, since January 1, 2025, silver futures have cumulatively risen 230% on a continuous contract basis. The trading volume of popular exchange-traded funds (ETFs) related to silver and their options contracts surged to historic highs on Monday.

On Monday, the two most actively traded stocks in the entire U.S. stock market were two ETFs linked to silver prices. Among them, the ProShares UltraShort Silver ETF (ZSL) was the most active, with nearly 800 million shares changing hands as investors bet that this rally would soon cool off. The second was the iShares Silver Trust (SLV), with a trading volume exceeding 377 million shares. All data is from preliminary statistics by Dow Jones Market Data.

The options trading volume linked to the iShares Silver Trust ETF also set a record, with both call and put options trading at unprecedented levels. Data shows that over 3.6 million call options were traded on Monday.

Additionally, according to Tom Bruni, head of market and retail investor insights at the investment-focused social media platform Stocktwits, the social media activity related to silver has also exploded.

Since late last month, the weekly page views for silver on Stocktwits have surged to 30 to 40 times the levels seen last summer. He stated:

"We haven't seen retail investors show such high interest in silver and precious metals in years; I would guess it dates back to before the last bull market ended in 2011."

In this context, JPMorgan's Marko Kolanovic conducted an in-depth analysis of the silver market. He believes that current silver prices are overvalued, primarily due to an imbalance in market supply and demand and the impact of the macroeconomic environment. From a supply and demand perspective, silver supply is relatively stable, but demand has been suppressed due to factors like economic slowdown. Furthermore, the uncertainty in the macroeconomic environment has negatively affected silver prices. Kolanovic expects that by late this year, silver prices could be halved.

Has Silver Become a Meme Stock?

Some believe that the simultaneous explosive growth in price and trading volume is enough to suggest that trading in this precious metal resembles that of a meme stock. On the X platform, at least one widely followed market commentator noted that his feed was flooded with posts about silver.

Mike Antonelli, a market strategist at Baird, posted on the X platform on Monday, comparing silver to GameStop (GME.US), one of the earliest representatives of meme stocks. In his post, he wrote:

"What’s the difference between silver and GameStop? Isn’t it a meme stock now?"

He continued, "Does silver have industrial uses? Of course. But in the past month, those uses haven’t changed enough to justify a 65% price increase. We live in an investment world where as long as something rises fast enough, everyone rushes in at the same time, with almost no barriers."

Others argue that comparing silver to meme stocks is not too far-fetched. As early as the beginning of 2021, during the first wave of meme stock frenzy, silver had already felt the heat driven by social media. Moreover, silver has long had a large following among individual investors.

Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers, stated:

"It doesn’t have the 'us versus them' narrative that characterized the early meme stock craze, but we are indeed seeing a momentum-driven frenzy that seems to have completely surpassed previous understandings of fundamentals and successfully captured the public's imagination."

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