Private investor demand to buy silver just leapt at its fastest pace since the Covid Crisis, according to latest data from UK bullion investment plartforms.
The surge in demand came as the price of silver − which finds more than half its end-use globally from industrial and tech applications, over five times the proportion for ‘useless’ safe haven gold − fell hard from new record highs for UK investors, only to rebound as US President Trump back-tracked on some of his ‘Liberation Day’ trade tariffs.
BullionVault said that the first week of May, investors who used its live 24/7 marketplace to buy securely-stored silver at early April’s sudden 7-month lows would have been offered net gains of 11.6% for GBP investments after all costs. Those gains would have been impossible for anyone buying small bars or coins rather than professionally-vaulted bullion, because those ‘retail’ units carry dealing spreads as wide as 10% plus VAT sales tax of 20% in the UK.
“While gold prices have stolen the headlines with new all-time records, silver has quietly risen to set fresh record highs of its own in Sterling and Euro terms,” said BullionVault director of research Adrian Ash on Thursday. “Driven long term by the same inflationary and geopolitical tensions as gold, the price of silver is more vulnerable to economic anxiety because of its strong productive uses. That made silver 40% more volatile day-to-day last month than the safe haven metal, offering larger gains to short-term traders but also carrying more risk.”
With silver prices spiking lower last month after setting a new all-time month-average high in Sterling terms, the number of investors worldwide who chose to buy silver across April more than doubled from March. It jumped 108.0% on BullionVault’s platform to the most since March 2021.
Silver Investor Index soars
The number of silver sellers meanwhile slipped 11.2% to the fewest since December last year. Together that sent the Silver Investor Index − BullionVault’s unique measure of sentiment, calculated back to New Year 2012 − soaring by 7.5 points to 58.3.
That marks the highest reading in 49 months, thanks to the steepest month-on-month jump in the Silver Investor Index since March 2020’s series-record rise of 20.4 points.
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Any reading above 50.0 means that buyers outnumbered sellers across the month. The Silver Investor Index set a series peak at 75.1 as the Covid crisis first struck in March 2020, and it set a series low of 45.0 on March last year’s record-heavy profit-taking.
Said Ash: “April’s surge of silver investment demand hasn’t yet run into May. That’s because it came thanks to silver prices spiking lower, just as happened in spring 2020. Longer-term, this spike in silver demand also followed nearly 2.5 years of net selling when prices rose and investors took profit, with sellers outnumbering buyers ten times on the Silver Investor Index across the previous 29 months.”
Investors sell gold bullion, buy silver
Silver investment by weight also leapt last month, totaling 17.8 tonnes net of customer selling. That was the heaviest 1-month buying since February 2021’s net demand of 25.3 tonnes − an inflow driven by the #silversqueeze ramp on social media.
This April’s big silver inflow took BullionVault clients’ total holdings up to a 7-month high above 1,160.5 tonnes. That contrasts with gold, where half-a-tonne of net selling last month shrank BullionVault clients’ total holdings to the lowest quantity in almost FIVE years, just beneath 43.8 tonnes, on the heaviest net liquidation since March 2024’s record 1-tonne of gold profit-taking.
But by value, gold holdings set a fresh all-time high once again, rising to £3.4 billion. The drop in silver prices, in contrast, meant that the surge of investor demand still put client holdings 6.9% below end-March’s record high, falling to £900 million.
“Whether or not the US-China tariff war is resolved quickly,” says Ash, “it’s likely to weigh on global trade and economic growth. Trump’s policies against green energy also present a headwind to silver, because the solar-energy sector worldwide has accounted for nearly two-thirds of the growth in total industrial demand to new record highs over the past decade.”
