Is anything not good for gold and silver these days?
Risk-on: gold up. Risk-off: gold up. Precious metals extend a historic rally toward their strongest annual gain in more than four decades.
Both gold and silver have added to their substantial 2025 gains over the last week, with the precious metals climbing to new all-time highs. Spot gold surged past $4,400 per ounce for the first time Monday morning, rising 1.7% to around $4,410 as of 10:40 a.m. in London, while silver was up 3.3% to a record high of $69 per ounce.
Writing about why gold — and to a lesser extent its sometimes forgotten sibling, silver — is rising or falling used to be fairly easy. But in 2025, reaching for reliable phrases like “gold rose as geopolitical tensions spiked” doesn’t tell the full story anymore.
Yes, there are fresh flashpoints, including Washington’s oil blockade of Venezuela and Ukraine’s first Mediterranean strike on a Russian tanker. But from a markets perspective, there’s little evidence that a broad risk-off sentiment is dominating this morning; speculative AI stocks are leading early trading, futures are green, and the dollar (as measured by the DXY Index) is flat against its major peers.
Indeed, increasingly, gold has traded like a meme stock this year, with retail traders pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into ETFs like the SPDR Gold Shares ETF. At times, that’s meant gold has rallied hard with risk-on assets, as well as fulfilling its more traditional role as a store of value and a safe haven at other times — with both underpinned by a constant stream of central bank buying. The result is that it seems like almost everything is good news for gold this year.
The barbarous relic has traded with an impeccably reliable trend this year, closing above its 50-day moving average in more than 89% of sessions in the past year. That’s the most amount of time gold has spent above that technical level since 1980.
“Appetite for precious metals may underscore market participants seeking at least some safe asset exposure in the event that things turn sour,” the Bank for International Settlements wrote in its most recent quarterly review. “But part of the surge can also be traced to investors trying to take advantage of the momentum in search of price appreciation, consistent with elevated risk-taking.”
All told, the two precious metals have posted outsized gains this year, with gold up 67% year to date driven by steady central bank purchases and inflows into bullion-backed ETFs. Silver surged even more, up 138% in 2025, amid a persistent supply deficit, strong industrial demand (which accounts for more than half of global silver consumption), and heavy speculative inflows.
Both are on track for their strongest annual gains since 1979, per Bloomberg.
Those gains are now reinforced by expectations of looser US monetary policy: markets are pricing in two rate cuts next year, a backdrop that tends to favor non-yielding assets like gold by reducing the relative appeal of safe interest-bearing assets.
