One of the bigger financial stories so far in 2026 is the overwhelming amount of “hot money” that has made its way into metals markets. By “hot money” we mean short-term speculators (often retail) trying to make a quick buck. Across many of the markets we trade - copper, gold, uranium, silver - hot money has caused prices to disconnect from fundamentals to various degrees.

At one end of the spectrum is gold and uranium, where the hot money has pushed prices to levels that are a little spicy, but still more or less consistent with underlying fundamentals. And, in both markets, there is a steady drumbeat of price-insensitive structural demand that will keep buying. Nuclear power plants aren’t going to stop buying uranium and global central banks aren’t going to suddenly decide that lending their surplus dollars back to the US government is attractive. In those markets, we think the longer-term thesis is intact, even though we expect more short-term volatility.

In the middle of the spectrum is copper, where prices have disconnected from supply/demand forces, but at least part of that is a “rational” stockpiling demand from folks worried about the Trump administration reversing course and slapping tariffs on refined copper. In the absence of those tariffs, we see tough times for copper over the next year as outsized inventories need to worked through - even if the longer-term picture still looks bright.

At the far end of the spectrum…the VERY far end…is silver. The price of silver at this point is more or less the same as the price of a meme stock or a meme coin, set pseudo-arbitrarily by hot money chasing recent returns.

Like any speculative frenzy, there is a narrative that traders are hanging their hats on, and that the performance-chasers use to justify jumping onboard. Specifically, that 1) the “debasement trade” - particularly in China - is causing buying and 2) there is a shortage in the physical silver market caused by solar panel demand. I wrote a piece in August (available on our website) titled “Plausible Nonsense.” That phrase comes to mind here.

Let’s look at 1). First, let’s get something out of the way - silver is mostly a functional industrial metal. The market is way too small to matter as a “storehold of wealth.” The IMF excludes silver in their definition of reserve assets, and basically no global central banks hold any. The chart below shows government participation in the silver market. No one has done anything for more than 10 years.

That could be ok (maybe) if you had a sustained capital flight into silver from smaller investors worried about their local currency. That is a big part of the narrative around the explosion of Chinese retail buying. We think that explanation is just wrong. Chinese investors almost always pile into the thing that just went up the most. That’s true for real estate, bank products, gold, silver, the stock market, etc. They rarely start market rallies, they just come in later and exacerbate the rally and the subsequent selloff. Silver buying in China is just pure retail performance chasing, like they always do, and has nothing to do with currency debasement. The chart below shows the story in equities (the example with the cleanest data). When markets have recently ripped, households lever up and buy, and vice versa. It’s not that deep.

On 2), the physical silver market has been balanced or in surplus from a supply/demand perspective for many years. We think the idea that solar demand has suddenly exploded to such a degree that it is causing an acute shortage is farfetched. This piece is already long so I won’t dive into the minutia, but there are physical market indicators that would be telling us if this was happening, and they aren’t. Instead what we are seeing is the opposite - a start of substitution away from silver because of the high price, and chatter around higher scrap supply. As always in commodities, the cure for high prices is high prices.

So are we telling you to short silver? Definitely not. In these newsletters we talk about what we believe and what we are doing, but you need to decide for yourself what you should do. And what we believe is that the dogecoin comparison in the title of this piece is apt. A lot of people made money in dogecoin (on both the long and short side), but a lot of people also got taken out on stretchers (again, on both the long and short side). This is the same journey speculators are on with silver. Do with that what you will.