For retail traders, silver is still the new gold — and it’s sending trading volumes for one ETF booming

Strategists sound alarm over silver’s rally, recommend options trades for potential violent reversal

Silver’s ridiculous romp higher in 2025 and at the start of this year is showing some signs of fraying around the edges.

And with just how fierce the move higher has been, strategists are warning of the potential for intense downside as some of the key parts of the fundamental and technical theses for silver are starting to look less solid.

Michael Purves, CEO of Tallbacken Capital Advisors, who’s been bullish on the shiny metal, thinks it’s once again time to hedge long exposure.

On Thursday, he recommended selling $95 strike calls on the iShares Silver Trust that expire in February to purchase $75 strike puts.

Purves previously recommended that clients hedge their silver exposure on December 26 (its 2025 peak) before declaring that the coast was once again clear for longs on December 30.

“It might be surprising to know that speculative long silver futures positions are at 20 month lows, or that Open Interest is at five year lows,” he wrote. “Once again, hedging long positions is in order — particularly given the distorted put-call skew which allows [investors] to sell calls to finance long put positions.”

Viresh Kanabar, an investment strategist at Macro Hive, followed this up on Friday by flagging one of several key changes in the market structure for silver. The physical market tightness, cited by bulls as an important driver behind silver’s skyward ascent, is showing signs of reversing.

“1m forwards on physical silver have flipped back to contango,” he wrote. “This lines up with physical ETF outflows and evidence that high prices are weighing on industrial demand.”

“In short, we are not bullish on silver at these levels, instead, see increasing signs of risks skewing to the downside,” Kanabar added.

David Cervantes, founder of Pinebrook Capital Management, told clients on Thursday that he’s taken a short position in silver by owning put options on SLV with three months to expiry, noting that its outperformance of the stock market over the past 100 and 252 days has reached unprecedented levels.

“THIS IS HIGHLY SPECULATIVE AND A SMALL GAMBLE-SIZED WAGER WILL BE MADE OVER WHICH SLEEP WILL NOT BE LOST,” he emphasized.

Matt Phillips2h

GE Vernova rises on plan to address data center power needs

GE Vernova rose Friday as the market digested reports of Trump administration plans to effectively push hyperscalers to foot the bill for new power plants to feed the giant grid that’s home to some of country’s most data center-dense districts.

In a note, Jefferies analysts called GE Vernova — the maker of turbines for natural gas-fueled power plants — the “clearest winner” of such a plan.

(The need for additional power plants would mean more sales and/or higher prices for its products.)

Jefferies says plans for additional capacity in the PJM grid — a 13-state swath that includes areas of high data center concentration like northern Virginia and Ohio — is a negative for companies like Vistra, Constellation Energy, and Talen Energy, which had invested heavily in the the PJM grid, likely hoping elevated prices would persist. That seems less likely should plans to boost power supply in the grid actually come to pass.

Trump to push Big Tech to fund new power plants as AI drives up electricity costs

(The need for additional power plants would mean more sales and/or higher prices for its products.)

Jefferies says plans for additional capacity in the PJM grid — a 13-state swath that includes areas of high data center concentration like northern Virginia and Ohio — is a negative for companies like Vistra, Constellation Energy, and Talen Energy, which had invested heavily in the the PJM grid, likely hoping elevated prices would persist. That seems less likely should plans to boost power supply in the grid actually come to pass.

Matt Phillips2h

AST SpaceMobile rises on deal giving it prime position for Golden Dome project

Retail favorite and satellite-services-from-space play AST SpaceMobile jumped early Friday on news that it’s signed a deal as a “prime contract awardee” for the US Department of Defense’s Golden Dome missile defense strategy, allowing it to quickly bid on and deliver services in R&D, engineering, and operations.

The agreement, known as an indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract, effectively prequalifies ASTS as a vendor for the Trump administration’s proposed Golden Dome project.

AST SpaceMobile Gets Golden Dome Contract

Luke Kawa4h

Flurry of positive announcements make ImmunityBio the next short squeeze target for retail traders

Heavily shorted ImmnuityBio is continuing its stellar run, up big in premarket trading after management delivered its fourth and fifth doses of positive news for the week.

In a pair of press releases, the biotech company said that:

A trial aiming to advance the utilization of its bladder cancer drug (ANKTIVA) is over 85% complete, with interim analysis having been positive.
A study of one of its treatments delivered in concert with another drug helped patients stay clear of Waldenstrom Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma for up to 15 months.

At their premarket peak on Friday, shares had more than doubled on the week.

The stock jumped 30% on Thursday after management said that ANKTIVA volume sales rose 750% in 2025. That came on the heels of a 7% rise on Wednesday after Saudi Arabia approved this drug as part of a treatment for bladder cancer and non-small cell lung cancer. And that followed a release from the company on Tuesday about how ANKTIVA “demonstrated statistically significant immune restoration across two clinical trials in 151 patients with non-small cell lung cancer,” driving shares up nearly 9%.

About 36.5% of the company’s shares were sold short as of the start of this year, and retail traders are clearly of the view that those betting against the company will be forced to capitulate amid this litany of positive releases. As of 7:30 a.m. ET, two of the top three posts on the r/ShortSqueeze subreddit center on the biotech firm, with one of these a cross-post from r/WallStreetBets of a more than $90,000 position initiated after the close on Thursday.

This may be another instance in which the term “short squeeze” looks like a bit of a misnomer: as of year-end 2025, about 120.6 million shares of IBRX were sold short, per exchange data. Cumulative volumes over the past three full sessions have been above 150 million. So going forward, if there are shorts left to be squeezed, it’s because this three-day spike (going on four days!) had much more to do with a buyer’s binge thanks to this string of encouraging news.

David Crowther & Claire Yubin Oh5h

Sandisk beat the entire S&P 500 in 2025… and it’s doing the same again this year

The New York Yankees. Italy’s national soccer team in the 1930s. The Chicago Bulls in the 1990s. The New England Patriots 22 years ago. Winning back-to-back titles etches your name in history.

And, though we’re only two weeks into the year, Sandisk is making a strong early case for its name to be added to the annals of stock market lore. After topping the S&P 500 Index with a whopping 559% total return in 2025, the stock is once again beating out around 500 of America’s largest companies this year too, already notching a 72% return since the calendars flipped. Sandisk is also up again in premarket trading on Friday.

Back-to-back S&P 500 champ?

Though we have index-level data for the S&P 500 going all the way back to the 1920s (when it was a composite benchmark of far fewer names), getting comprehensive year-by-year returns of its constituents is a trickier business. But, from our research this morning, we found that no stock has ever managed to top the list twice in a row. That’s certainly the case in the modern era, though AppLovin made a strong defense of its 2024 title last year, finishing 11th with a 108% gain, while another AI-adjacent name, Palantir Technologies, came pretty close in both of the last two years. After gaining more than 350% in 2024, finishing second, Palantir led the index at various points last year, before Sandisk went parabolic to take the crown.

While other memory and storage companies like Western Digital, Seagate, and Micron have made serious gains, none have ripped as hard as SNDK.

Reemerging as a stand-alone company from Western Digital in February 2025, Sandisk’s focus on flash storage (specifically NAND) has made it an investor favorite as a pure-play company, benefiting from the enormous troves of data stored by hyperscalers to train and deploy their AI models — a need that is only likely to grow as adoption surges. Could Sandisk manage the back-to-back? The math (and the history) would suggest it’s very unlikely, even after a blistering start.