True to their contrarian ethos, retail investors mobilising via the r/WallStreetBets bulletin board are betting big on silver. The metal tags along behind gold in the minds of most fund managers and commodities traders.
The silver price surged 10 per cent in morning trading. But history is not on the side of WSB investors, nor frankly is logic. This is a different proposition to Gamestop, a single, out-of-favour equity. Buying exchange traded funds is unlikely to push up the price of this world commodity for long.
The Hunt Brothers cornered the silver market for a while in the 1970s and Warren Buffett bought heavily in the late 1990s. These moves, in part, reflected surging gold prices and doubts about the worthiness of fiat currencies controlled by central banks.