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Gold trades above $5,000 as silver pushes past $100, with ETF inflows, central-bank buying and tightening vault inventories shaping a volatile early-year market that challenges conventional portfolio assumptions.
As the first month of the year closes, Carvina Capital Pte. Ltd. issues research on a precious-metals market that keeps resetting expectations, with gold trading above $5,000 an ounce in late-week pricing and silver holding in three figures. The move reads as a referendum on the stability of the policy environment and on the reliability of traditional diversifiers, with Peter Jacobs, Director of Private Equity at Carvina Capital Pte. Ltd., framing it as “a market that prices trust, where the scarcer commodity is confidence rather than bullion, and the price action forces investors to reconsider what counts as a safe haven”.
Over the previous calendar year, silver delivers a 147% rise and gold advances 65%, and the past four weeks add a further 40% for silver and about 30% for gold. Gold also prints levels as high as $5,343.6 an ounce during the past week, after hovering near $4,988 in the final stretch of the prior year, underlining how quickly investors now move from hedging to chasing price momentum. Central banks keep adding to their holdings over the past year, particularly in emerging markets, reinforcing the idea that demand is not confined to short-term speculation.
Silver carries sharper volatility. The metal changes hands as high as $117.7 an ounce in early-week dealing, yet a single-session reversal during the past week wipes 26% from prices, sliding from above $114.5 to around $82.6. Even after that whipsaw, silver still sits roughly 150% higher than it trades a year earlier. Bank forecasts cited in market commentary extend to $150 for silver within the next quarter and to about $5,725.3 for gold over a similar horizon.
Carvina Capital’s briefing treats relative value as the more revealing story, with the gold-to-silver ratio tightening towards 50:1 earlier in the week and holding around 57.4:1 in end-of-month pricing, compared with roughly 105:1 in the second quarter of the previous calendar year and a 70:1 average observed over the past decade. In Jacobs’s reading, “the compression is the market admitting that silver is no longer a side bet; it is becoming a front-line macro signal alongside gold”.
Demand indicators reinforce that shift. Data referenced in the briefing shows about $879.6 million flowing into silver-backed exchange-traded funds over the past month, with the iShares Silver Trust taking in roughly $66 million on its strongest retail day during the past week. Over the past four weeks the fund rises 31.3%, and over the past year it returns 210.9%. Physical buying stays elevated, with investment demand totalling 1,374 tonnes over the previous calendar year and 420 tonnes over the final quarter of that year, while retailers in Hong Kong and southern China report bar inventory clearing within hours of delivery and jewellers adjust product lines as customers seek value.
Institutional appetite is visible in gold as well as silver. Gold-backed exchange-traded funds add more than 800 tonnes of demand over the previous calendar year compared with the year before, lifting global holdings to around 4,025 tonnes by the close of that period, and aggregate inflows reach about $84.9 billion over the same timeframe. North American funds contribute 446 tonnes over that year, valued at roughly $48.7 billion, as portfolio managers weigh stretched equity valuations, persistent geopolitical risk and the prospect of lower policy rates across major economies over the coming quarters.
Supply constraints magnify the price response. Silver markets register deficits for seven consecutive years, building a cumulative shortfall close to 800 million ounces since the start of the decade, and supply remains inelastic because, in recent years, 70% to 80% of annual output comes as a by-product of copper, lead, zinc and gold mining. Refining capacity adds another bottleneck, with global throughput estimated at about 1.3 billion ounces a year across roughly 40 major facilities and processing delays averaging about three months at present. Visible inventories remain thin, with available silver in London down 33% over roughly the past four and a half years and readily available stocks shrinking from about 850 million ounces to around 200 million ounces over the past seven years; COMEX inventories fall about 29 million ounces over the past month.
For investors tempted to treat the rally as a one-way trade, the message is less about triumphalism and more about market plumbing. Carvina Capital points to short liquidity, tight inventories and momentum-heavy positioning as a mix that can move prices faster than fundamentals, with Jacobs concluding that “pullbacks are the market’s stress tests of leverage and settlement systems, and the disciplined response is to treat volatility as information, not noise”.
Carvina Capital Pte. Ltd. (UEN: 201220825D) is based in Singapore and has operated since 2012. It specialises in research-driven, long-only public equity strategies for institutional and professional markets, and it is evaluating products that may be accessible to retail investors. The firm combines fundamental research with disciplined risk management intended to compound capital across full market cycles. Further information is available at https://carvina.com.
Media enquiries: Huacheng Yu, media@carvina.com
