Silver Rises Over 120% YTD 
Published: 08-04-2026, 10:00 am
Key Takeaways
- Gold is down roughly 5% from its year-end 2025 close — not 27%. Most investors compare today’s price to January’s speculative peak, not to the actual 2025 full-year return.
- Over 2024 and 2025 combined, gold returned 110% and silver returned approximately 200%. The correction is historically mild by that standard.
- The three structural fundamentals driving gold remain fully intact: US deficit spending, anti-dollar sentiment, and Fed credibility erosion.
- The Warsh Fed is less likely to raise rates as aggressively as markets currently expect. That changes the calculus for gold investors.
- Gold sentiment recently hit one of its most bearish readings in four decades. Historically, extremes like this have marked bottoms, not tops.
Gold hit an all-time high of $5,589 on January 28, 2026. Today it trades near $4,072. That is a steep drop — and it feels significant.
But before you conclude the bull market is over, consider this key fact. Gold ended 2025 up 65% for the year. From that year-end close, gold is down roughly 5%. Most investors are not comparing today’s price to year-end 2025. They are comparing it to a January speculative peak — and that peak was an anomaly.
In a recent episode of the GoldSilver Show, Trey Reik made the case that the gold bull market is not over. Reik is Chief Economist at GBI. He argued that the structural forces driving gold higher have not changed at all. What you are seeing is a correction. Corrections in strong bull markets are normal.
This article covers the key analytical points from that conversation. However, the full discussion goes deeper. Watch it below — especially Reik’s specific views on mining equities and why summer weakness may be the most valuable buying opportunity of the year.
Is the Gold Bull Market Really Over?
The short answer is no. Understanding why, however, requires looking at what actually happened in January.
Gold gained 27% in 2024. It then gained 65% in 2025. Together, that is a compounded two-year return of 110%. Silver did even better. According to Reik, silver was up 21% in 2024 and approximately 147% in 2025, for a compounded return of approximately 200%.
Then January arrived. In that single month through the 29th, gold surged 29.5%. Silver jumped 70%. Those moves were extreme. They were driven by speculative momentum, not fundamentals.
One data point tells the story clearly. On January 26, 2026, the iShares Silver Trust recorded $171 million in single-day net purchases [GoldSilver Show / Trey Reik, GBI]. That was double the previous record of $93 million, set during the 2021 silver squeeze. Markets were running hot.
Speculative blowoff tops always correct. The correction came in late January and early February. Gold fell sharply. Silver fell harder. Then, importantly, by March 2, gold recovered to $5,400 and silver was back near $103. The fundamentals reasserted themselves almost immediately.
What has weighed on gold since then is not a structural breakdown. According to Reik, it is Iran-related geopolitical tension. That tension sparked a specific market reasoning chain: higher oil leads to higher inflation, which means the Fed must tighten. That chain has suppressed gold. As we will discuss below, however, the final step of that chain may be wrong.
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Why Does the Correction Feel Worse Than the Numbers Show?
There is a psychological reason the correction feels so severe. Your reference point matters enormously.
If you are measuring gold from January 29, you are down roughly 27%. If you are measuring silver from its January high of $121.62 [goldsilver.com/price-charts/], you are down nearly 51%. Those numbers are painful.
Consider this alternative frame, however. If you bought gold at the end of 2023 — before the 2024 bull run even started — you are still up roughly 100%. The market did not erase the bull run. It corrected a speculative blowoff.
Reik made the point directly. If someone had told you three years ago that gold would return 110% over 2024 and 2025, then correct only 5% from year-end, you would have considered that a reasonable outcome. The problem is that January’s high shifted the psychological reference point for millions of investors.
This is a well-documented pattern in markets. Investors anchor to peaks. Moreover, they experience losses more acutely than equivalent gains. As a result, a 5% YTD decline feels catastrophic after a 65% calendar-year gain.
Understanding this pattern is the first step toward seeing the correction clearly.
What Are the Three Fundamentals Still Driving Gold?
Reik identifies three structural forces that have driven gold higher over the past several years. Crucially, none of them has changed.
US deficit spending. The federal government has normalized what were once emergency-level fiscal outlays. Annual deficits have stabilized around $2 trillion. The interest burden on federal debt currently stands at $1.2 trillion per year [Trey Reik / GBI, GoldSilver Show]. By 2035, that figure is estimated to rise to $2.1 trillion. This creates a debt doom loop: more borrowing pushes rates higher, which increases the interest burden, which requires even more borrowing. Confidence in the government’s fiscal trajectory continues to erode. Gold benefits from that erosion.
Anti-dollar sentiment. The watershed moment came in March 2022. That is when Western governments froze Russia’s foreign exchange reserves. That decision reshaped how sovereign wealth managers and central banks think about dollar-denominated assets. Since that date, China has grown its gold holdings by roughly 20% in ounce terms. Meanwhile, China cut its US Treasury holdings by approximately 30% — from around $1 trillion to roughly $683 billion as of late 2025 [US Treasury TIC data]. That rotation is not a trade. It is a strategic reallocation that has been building for years.
Fed credibility erosion. The 2021 policy error did real damage to the Fed’s credibility. The Bernanke-era Fed maintained $120 billion per month in quantitative easing while GDP ran at 6% [Trey Reik / GBI, GoldSilver Show]. CPI climbed toward 7%. Unemployment had already fallen sharply. Rebuilding credibility takes time. And the new Fed chair’s approach, as we will discuss below, may actually reduce the likelihood of the aggressive rate hikes that gold bears are currently pricing in.
These three forces took decades to build. They will not resolve in a single quarter. According to Reik, they may take another decade to fully unwind. That is the structural case for gold. It has not changed.
What Does the Warsh Fed Mean for Gold Investors?
Kevin Warsh is now chair of the Federal Reserve. His approach differs meaningfully from his predecessors. Understanding those differences matters for gold investors.
When Warsh was a Fed governor under Ben Bernanke, he resigned seven years before his term expired. He did so specifically to protest QE2 and viewed it as a significant policy error. He has since been critical of what he calls the Fed’s “neo-Keynesian” framework — the approach of focusing on anchoring inflation expectations. Warsh is more concerned with the impacts on the underlying economy [Trey Reik / GBI, GoldSilver Show].
Two specific Warsh positions are relevant here. First, he believes the Fed’s balance sheet is too large and needs to shrink. Second, he has explicitly criticized the culture of heavy forward guidance. This practice of telegraphing future rate decisions allows markets to “play the ball, not the referee.” He has signaled this will change.
The market currently prices in the possibility of multiple rate hikes this year. Some Wall Street forecasts model three hikes. Reik is skeptical. His argument is straightforward: given current debt levels, the economy cannot absorb aggressive rate hikes without serious damage. Furthermore, Warsh’s framework makes it less likely that the Fed will react mechanically to oil-driven inflation readings.
This matters directly for gold. Rate hike expectations have been one of the primary headwinds in 2026. If those expectations are overpriced, the headwind weakens — and the structural tailwinds described above come back into focus.
What Is Gold Sentiment Telling Investors Right Now?
Here is a number worth sitting with. On June 24, 2026, the Bernstein Daily Sentiment Index for gold hit 10% bullish [Trey Reik / GBI, GoldSilver Show]. In other words, 90% of retail traders on the CME were bearish on gold.
Over the past 25 years — approximately 6,800 trading days — the DSI for gold registered a more bearish reading on only 1.9% of days. Every time this indicator has reached 10% bullish in that 25-year history, it has formed a bottom.
That does not guarantee gold rises from here. No indicator does. However, it does mean the sentiment picture is almost entirely one-directional. When bearishness reaches an extreme like this, the sellers who wanted to sell have already sold. There is little incremental selling pressure left.
Reik has tracked this indicator for four decades. He described the current reading as the worst precious metals sentiment he has seen in that entire period.
Extreme sentiment readings do not create rallies on their own. Catalysts still matter. However, they do remove one of the biggest obstacles to a recovery. They clear the weight of too many people leaning the same way at once.
The full conversation with Trey Reik covers significantly more ground than covered here. He shares his specific views on gold mining equities — including why he believes they are deeply undervalued relative to their cash flows. He lays out why he expects a major M&A wave across the mining sector over the next 12 to 18 months. And he explains why summer weakness, historically, may be the most valuable buying opportunity of the year.
Those details are in the video. Watch the full interview on the GoldSilver Show now:
Watch: Is the Gold Bull Market Over? — The Full Interview →
If you are ready to act on what you learn, explore GoldSilver’s storage and custody options — the institutional-grade platform built for investors who understand exactly what they own and why.
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SOURCES
1. Trey Reik, Chief Economist, GBI — GoldSilver Show Interview, August 2026
2. GoldSilver — Live Gold & Silver Price Charts
3. World Gold Council — Gold Demand Trends Q2 2026 (July 30, 2026)
4. Federal Reserve — FOMC Statements and Minutes
5. US Treasury — Treasury International Capital (TIC): Major Foreign Holders of US Treasuries
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Always consult a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions.
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