In this photo illustration, silver bars are displayed at Polyak Precious Metals on Jan. 14, 2026 in San Francisco, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Retail investors are betting big on major swings in silver.
The question is which way the precious metal could go.
Individual investors on Monday sent about $171 million on net into the iShares Silver Trust (SLV), a popular exchange-traded fund that tracks the metal, according to market research firm VandaTrack. That marked the largest ever single day flow of new funds into the trust, almost double the previous peak recorded during the “silver squeeze” of 2021.
“Silver has just become retail’s new [favorite] toy,” Vanda analyst Ashwin Bhakre wrote on Tuesday.
Monday’s rush came as the Silver Trust climbed nearly 6%, driving its 2026 rally to more than 52% and extending last year’s nearly 145% advance.
The SLV ETF, year to date
Silver topped $100 an ounce last week for the first time ever.
Bhakre said silver has surpassed technology stocks to become the epicenter of retail fervor.
Well-known tech stocks including Nvidia, Tesla and Palantir were among the most bought individual names by mom-and-pop traders in 2025, according to Vanda.
But silver is now an even hotter trade than Nvidia, the high-flying artificial intelligence beneficiary that has enchanted Wall Street since late 2022. Silver’s turnover momentum, which gauges trading acceleration, has jumped to 11.55 times its normal level — higher than Nvidia’s 7.54-times.
As a result, “in relative terms, the ‘chase’ in silver is now more intense than the classic AI trade,” Bhakre said.
Heightened interest in silver, once known as the poor man’s gold, has a “halo effect” for mining stocks, Bhakre said. Hecla Mining and Coeur Mining have been seen flows of new cash jump to more than two-times their normal pace, Vanda data shows. Hecla and Coeur shares have soared almost 40% or more just since New Year’s.
But Bhakre said investors are waging a “two-front war” in silver.
On the bearish side, Vanda found abnormally high flow ratios into the ProShares UltraShort Silver (ZSL), showing plenty of individual investors are making leveraged bets that the price will crash, Bhakre said.
Still, retail investors no longer appear to just be looking to play a squeeze on precious metal prices, Bhakre said. Instead, the group is “structurally repositioning” to gain exposure to a longer-lived, hard-asset cycle.
Others are doubtful.
LossDog founder Tom Sosnoff described silver’s price action in less than a month as equivalent to what would typically occur over several years, calling the move a “meme stock trade” in terms of both surging trading volume and high volatility.
Gold and silver are “absolutely, kind of, the meme commodity of 2026,” Sosnoff said on CNBC’s “Worldwide Exchange.” “The silver move has been wild.”
“The trade’s been unbelievable, but it’s been very one-way,” he added. “I think it’s taken a lot of hostages on the way up, because the … trading street is short.”