A vendor shows various models and weights of silver bullion at a gold jewellery manufacturer in “El Sagha”, as gold prices recorded an increase after a devaluation of the local currency, at the gold market area in Cairo, Egypt January 14, 2024.
Amr Abdallah Dalsh | Reuters
Silver’s rapid surge and equally dramatic reversal in recent weeks has led market watchers to ask a fundamental question: when does an asset stop trading on fundamentals and start behaving like a meme?
The volatility in silver prices has drawn growing comparisons to meme stocks such as GameStop, the video-game retailer that became a global phenomenon in 2021 after retail traders on Reddit piled in en masse, sending its shares soaring far beyond what traditional valuation models could justify.
Meme stocks are typically characterized by a few core traits: sharp, often parabolic price moves, heavy participation by retail investors and narratives that go viral on social media, sometimes overwhelming fundamentals altogether. Liquidity can rush in quickly, and often exits just as fast.
Michael Antonelli, market strategist at Bull and Baird, laid out the comparison bluntly on X: “How is Silver different than, say, GameStop?” he asked in a post last week. “Is this not a meme now?”
He told CNBC that the metal has reached a kind of “zeitgeist” with retail traders who are starting to move as a herd. While silver does have industrial and consumer uses, prices do not usually move over 100% in three months: “It is totally disconnected and went vertical based on retail flows,” he said.
Individual investors on Jan. 26 poured about $171 million net into the iShares Silver Trust, a popular exchange-traded fund that tracks the metal, according to recent market research firm VandaTrack. That was almost double the previous peak recorded during the “silver squeeze” of 2021.
Spot silver prices advanced almost 4% to $4,852.76 per ounce on Tuesday, while silver futures in New York rose over 9% to $84 per ounce.
Over the past month, silver has recorded 10 moves of 5% or more in either direction.
“Silver has just become retail’s new [favorite] toy,” Vanda analyst Ashwin Bhakre said.
That enthusiasm is visible across Reddit. The platform played a central role in the original meme-stock phenomenon, with threads such as WallStreetBets helping to coordinate retail buying in GameStop in 2021.
On the Reddit Silverbugs forum — a community where users document physical purchases, debate price targets and share memes — posts following the recent sell-off are emblematic of the meme-stock culture.
Silver prices in the past month
“Bought the dip today! DIAMOND HANDS,” wrote Reddit user Jstaakz following the sell-off Friday. “Diamond hands” is a meme-stock term used by retail traders to signal that they plan to keep holding an asset despite sharp losses or extreme volatility, often as a show of conviction or defiance against selling pressure.
Another user asked fellow traders for advice on Monday on whether they should hold or sell their silver, adding that it was bought at $48 per ounce last June.
“Silver is just GameStop in 2026,” Antonelli said.
A self-fulfilling frenzy
For some analysts, silver’s behavior has crossed a familiar and dangerous threshold.
Rhona O’Connell, head of market Intelligence at StoneX, warned that prices had detached from sustainable levels.
“Silver was massively over-valued and in a self-fulfilling frenzy; it is however notoriously fickle and its history is littered with examples of price crashes,” she said. “At present it is behaving like Icarus and to extend the analogy there is a strong risk of other buyers getting burned.”
Tom Sosnoff, chief executive officer at financial technology platform Lossdog, even included gold into the meme fold: “Gold and silver have been absolutely kind of the meme commodity of 2026 … the silver move has been wild … We’re basically seeing a multi-year moves in less than 30 days.”
“Huge volume, huge volatility, not too much rhyme or reason why. I mean, you can make up as many fundamental or technical reasons as you want, but it’s a meme stock trade,” Sosnoff said.
He cautioned that newer participants were drawn in by headlines and social media. “If you’ve never traded silver before in the futures market or in the ETF market, just be careful. These are big contracts, and they fly around, and they’re moving around at levels that, you know, we’ve never seen before.”
Henrietta Treyz, managing partner at Veda Partners, said the dynamic was unmistakable. “The moves in precious metals are really quite something, whether it’s gold or silver. And you can tell as an outside observer that the meme stock component is very much alive and well,” she said. “It reminds me of GameStop.”
However, not everyone agrees silver should be lumped in with narrative-only assets.
Vasu Menon, managing director of investment strategy at OCBC, said silver “sometimes behaves like a meme commodity, but it isn’t one by nature,” pointing to industrial demand from solar panels, electric vehicles and electronics. Menon, however, acknowledged that speculation had amplified recent moves and that sharp corrections were part of silver’s DNA.
