Silver’s Bull Run Didn’t Break — The CME Did

Silver’s rally just ran into a wall — but it wasn’t silver that broke. The exchange did. 

On a day when trading was halted across much of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) complex, silver was already in the middle of a powerful bull run. Then the system went dark. 

Officially, we’re told it was a cooling-system issue at a data center. Unofficially, a lot of silver investors looked at the tape and said: 

“Silver just broke the casino.” 

Whether you buy that or not almost doesn’t matter — because when trading came back, silver’s bull run was still very much intact. 

What Actually Broke: Silver or the System? 

On the day of the halt, trading was interrupted across a huge swath of CME markets: 

• Futures 

• Derivatives 

• Currencies 

• Gold and silver 

Roughly 90% of global derivatives trading stopped because a single data center in Illinois couldn’t stay cool enough to handle the load. 

The official story: 

The data center exceeded its cooling capacity; servers overheated; trading was halted. 

Could that be true? Sure. The systems were originally designed around 2015, and the amount of data being pushed through them in 2025 is drastically higher. 

But here’s the key point: 

Regardless of whether silver caused the halt, silver’s bull run did not stop. The exchange did. 

When you see a market so hot that any system glitch gets instantly blamed on it, you’re learning something important about the underlying trend. 

“Money Is Unraveling, Confidence Is Eroding, Price Signals Are Returning” 

Analyst Ben Rickert captured the situation in a single thread that’s now making the rounds among silver watchers: 

“Money is unraveling. Confidence is eroding. Price signals are returning. And silver — the underestimated monetary metal — is leading the way. 
The bull run didn’t pause, the exchange did.” 

A few important ideas packed into that: 

• Money is unraveling – He’s really talking about currency. Central banks have expanded the money supply massively. Governments are drowning in debt. People are quietly questioning the long-term viability of their fiat currency. 

• Confidence is eroding – Banking crises, inflation spikes, negative real yields, political dysfunction… trust in the current system isn’t what it was even a decade ago. 

• Price signals are returning – For years, ultra-low interest rates and large-scale interventions distorted market prices. As those interventions strain or fail, price moves in real assets (like silver) start telling the truth again. 

• Silver is leading the way – Silver isn’t just an industrial metal. It’s monetary. Historically, it’s been used as money just as gold has — and when confidence in paper currency erodes, monetary metals tend to move first and fastest. 

So when you see silver breaking out while the system itself is glitching, it may not be random. It may be the market trying to re-price monetary metals for a new era. 

Margin Hikes, “Cooling Issues”… and Still a Breakout 

If this were a fragile, speculative move, you’d expect a little resistance to knock it over. 

Instead, we’re seeing the opposite. 

In the weeks leading up to the halt, CME had already been ratcheting up margin requirements: 

• September 13 – Gold margins raised by 6.7% 

• September 25 – Gold +6.3%, silver +6.7% 

• October 9 – Gold +5.9%, silver +9.4% 

• October 16 – Gold +5.6%, silver +8.6% 

• October 23 – Gold and silver both +5.3% 

Raising margins makes it more expensive to hold leveraged futures positions. It’s a classic tool to cool down a hot market. Yet despite these hikes: 

• Silver broke out above prior highs 

• The price moved more than 3% above the previous top, a strong confirmation of a real breakout 

• The 10-day and 50-day moving averages have repeatedly provided support on this uptrend, with pullbacks working off overbought conditions and then resuming higher 

In other words, they’ve already tried tapping the brakes — and silver kept accelerating. 

The “cooling issue” at the data center might end up being the perfect metaphor: the system overheated trying to contain a trend that’s bigger than the pipes carrying the data. 

The Big Picture: A 45-Year Cup-and-Handle 

Zoom the chart out, and something even more interesting appears. 

Silver has been building what looks like a massive, 45-year cup-and-handle pattern: 

• The “cup” formed over decades of grinding sideways after the 1980 blow-off top. 

• The “handle” has been the long, frustrating consolidation and shakeout since the 2011 highs. 

• The recent breakout suggests that handle may be complete — and that we’re finally moving into the “off to the races” phase. 

On a long-term chart, the structure looks less like ordinary volatility and more like a once-in-a-generation reset of silver’s role in the monetary system. 

Déjà Vu: This Looks a Lot Like the Late 1970s 

If this all feels familiar, that’s because a remarkably similar script played out in the late 1970s silver mania. 

Back then: 

• Silver rose from around $6 in early 1979 to a closing high near $49.45 in January 1980 (and about $52.50 intraday). 

• The Hunt brothers held a major, concentrated position in silver futures. 

• The Federal Reserve and the exchange were deeply concerned about gold’s runaway bull market and the survival of the newly unbacked U.S. dollar (it had only been fully fiat for about eight years). 

• Silver was a much smaller market than gold — perhaps around one-thirtieth the size — and thus easier to target. 

So what did the exchange do? 

1. Repeated margin hikes – Sound familiar? They increased the cost of holding futures contracts again and again. 

2. Position limits – They capped how many contracts a single player could hold, forcing large traders to dump silver. 

3. Liquidation Orders Only – The final nuclear option: traders could only sell futures to close positions; they were not allowed to open new longs. 

That last rule is effectively a command: 

“Until we say otherwise, the price must fall.” 

Under that pressure, silver finally cracked. Gold topped the same day, and the dollar survived. 

The kicker? Many of the people running the commodities exchange at the time were later revealed to be heavily short silver. They were making the rules in a game where they were deeply exposed. 

Is History About to Rhyme? 

Today, we don’t (yet) have: 

• Position limits that force major longs out 

• Liquidation-only rules in silver 

What we do have is: 

• A powerful, technically confirmed breakout 

• A series of margin hikes that failed to stop the advance 

• A system so strained that a single data center cooling failure paused 90% of global derivatives 

• A long-term monetary backdrop of soaring debt, aggressive currency expansion, and falling confidence in fiat 

Back in November 1979, silver broke out and then went nearly vertical into January 1980. 

Now, roughly 40+ years later, we have another breakout around the same calendar window — under arguably more extreme monetary conditions. 

If you adjust that old $50 high for: 

• The expansion of the currency supply 

• Growth in GDP 

• Four-plus decades of inflation and financial engineering 

You may not just be talking about silver revisiting $50. You could be talking about moving the decimal point one place to the right. 

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What This Could Mean for Silver Investors 

None of this is a guarantee. Markets can shake out, consolidate, or surprise. But if: 

• Money really is unraveling (currencies, not value itself), 

• Confidence in the current system continues to erode, and 

• Price signals are allowed to return in real assets… 

Then monetary metals are likely to be re-priced higher — and silver, the “underestimated monetary metal,” may lead the charge. 

For someone watching for a safe-haven metals explosion, this might be the early innings of exactly that move. 

Prudent investors who see this possibility often consider: 

• Owning physical silver outright (not just paper claims) 

• Reducing dependence on leveraged futures, which can be targeted with margin hikes and rule changes 

• Position sizing for volatility – silver moves faster and more violently than gold, both up and down 

• Thinking in cycles, not days – focusing on the big-picture regime change, not every headline about “cooling issues” and temporary halts 

Silver’s bull run didn’t break. The CME did. 

The system can pause trading. It can raise margins. It can change the rules mid-game, just as it did in the late 1970s. 

But as long as currencies keep unraveling and confidence keeps eroding, the underlying cycle in monetary metals doesn’t stop. It just keeps grinding forward — sometimes slowly, sometimes in explosions. 

Right now, silver looks like it’s preparing for one of those explosions. 

People Also Ask 

Did silver really cause the CME trading halt? 

No. The CME halt was officially triggered by a cooling-system failure at a Chicago data center, not by silver itself. However, the timing caused many traders to assume silver “broke the system” because the metal was already surging. The key point is that silver’s bull run never paused — only the exchange did, which reinforces the strength of the current breakout. 

Why is silver outperforming during this monetary cycle? 

Silver is outperforming because confidence in fiat currency is eroding, debt levels are extreme, and real price signals are returning after years of intervention. As a monetary metal, silver often leads when investors seek protection from inflation, currency debasement, or systemic instability. This cycle mirrors past periods when silver was aggressively repriced higher. 

What does silver’s breakout above prior highs mean for investors? 

Silver breaking out above prior highs — even after multiple CME margin hikes — is a strong technical signal of a new bullish phase. A breakout confirmed by price moving more than 3% above its previous peak typically indicates momentum that can carry into much higher price ranges. It suggests the market is beginning to re-price silver in line with long-term monetary shifts. 

Is the current silver market similar to the late-1970s silver mania? 

Yes. The current setup echoes the 1979–1980 silver mania, when silver exploded from $6 to over $50. Today, we’re seeing a similar pattern: rapid price appreciation, system stress, rising margin requirements, and a potential loss of confidence in the dollar. The difference is the modern backdrop includes far greater currency expansion, meaning a comparable move today could place silver much higher—potentially an order of magnitude above $50. 

Could silver lead a broader safe-haven metals surge? 

Absolutely. Silver historically leads gold during periods of monetary stress because it’s a smaller market and more sensitive to shifts in confidence. As debt rises, currencies weaken, and systemic cracks appear, investors increasingly turn to monetary metals. With silver already breaking out, many analysts believe it could kick off the next major safe-haven cycle, pulling gold and other metals higher with it.