The Best Dates to Buy and Sell Silver in 2026

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By Michael Salvatore, Editor, TradeSmith Daily

In This Digest:

Silver’s momentum looks unstoppable
Dollar weakness is a key factor
15 years of data show silver isn’t a firm sell until June
Our AI algorithm forecasts a 20% move
TradeSmith’s next giant leap with Seasonal Advantage

Silver is having a meme stock moment…

The precious metal rose 144% in 2025. That’s its strongest year since 1979.

And it continues to soar in 2026.

Yesterday, it rallied another 14% – its strongest day of gains since 1985.

That puts the gains since the start of 2026 at nearly 50%. Take a look…

It’s not just silver. Gold has also been surging higher.

Yesterday, it crossed the psychologically important $5,000 mark. And since it began its bull run in November 2022, it’s up nearly 200%.

So today, let’s look at where precious metals are going from here, using our TradeSmith toolkit. As you’ll see, the weight of data suggests higher prices for both metals over the short term.

First, some important historical context.

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Until 1967, silver was part of U.S. coinage…

You could find 0.07 ounces of the metal in a dime and 0.18 ounces in a quarter. And up until 1965, half dollars contained 0.36 ounces of silver.

That meant silver was tied to government policy. The Treasury bought and sold the metal at a fixed price of $1.29 an ounce to maintain supplies for coins.

And up until the “Nixon Shock” in 1971, the U.S. dollar was still backed by gold. Although U.S. citizens could no longer convert their dollars to gold, foreign governments exchanged theirs at a fixed rate of $35 an ounce.

By the time 1979 rolled around, silver had been a freely traded commodity for only about a decade.

And it was the perfect storm for this shiny new portfolio holding. The fiat dollar was in free fall, thanks to double-digit inflation. There was rising geopolitical tension in the form of the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

And silver, like gold, has traditionally been held as a hedge against both inflation and global chaos.

It’s not hard to see the similarities between then and now…

The U.S. dollar index tracks the exchange-rate of the dollar versus a basket of trading partner currencies like the Japanese yen, the euro, and the British pound sterling.

Since its recent peak at the start of 2025, the U.S. Dollar Index is down nearly 12%. That’s a massive move for the world reserve currency in less than one month.

We don’t have double-digit inflation anymore (in 1979, the annual pace of inflation hit 11.3%). But as we’ve been tracking in these pages, inflation remains stubbornly high. And the fear of another spike hasn’t gone away.

There’s also rising of geopolitical tension. Since Jan. 1, we’ve seen regime change in Venezuela, attempted regime change in Iran, and conflict among NATO allies over the future of Greenland.

And that’s before we account for an upcoming change of leadership at the Fed, a Supreme Court ruling on the legality of President Trump’s tariffs, and a bitter clash over immigration policy.

But that’s the story most folks already know.

Here at TradeSmith, we’re less interested in narratives and more interested in what the data tells us. Because that’s what gives us a real edge as investors.

There’s no clear seasonality pattern for silver right now…

Our Seasonality tool looks for times of the year when stocks or ETFs tend to rise and fall by combing through more than 2 quintillion data points.

With it, you can focus in on periods of time… five years… 15 years… or as long as there’s data for an asset.

You can even look based on where we are in the election cycles – in this case, it’s a midterm election year.

It distills this data down into bullish and bearish seasonal windows that have occurred consistently in the past.

The chart below looks at seasonal windows for the popular silver-backed ETF, the iShares Silver ETF (SLV) going back 15 years.

Why 15 years? It’s the period our chief “quant” Mike Carr prefers for his analysis because it’s the right balance between relevance and statistical weight.

And as you can see, the first strong seasonal window (red shaded area on the chart) doesn’t kick off until June 9. And it’s bearish for silver.

We don’t get a bullish seasonal window (green shaded area) until Oct. 2.

And there are no Optimal seasonal patterns at all for silver in 2026. Those are the most consistent windows we’ve seen in our testing.

So let’s turn instead to our Predictive Alpha trading model…

As regular readers will know, it uses the same underlying technology as Elon Musk’s Grok, Google’s Gemini, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to forecast stock moves up to 21 trading days out.

And over the next 17 trading days, it’s forecasting a nearly 20% rise for SLV.

This doesn’t guarantee that a stock or ETF will reach its projected target. But this projection has historically reached its projected target price within 17 days 85.9% of the time. So it’s worth paying attention to.

We get stronger seasonal signals for gold…

Silver may be stealing the limelight. But we’ve also been witnessing the strongest rally for gold since it started trading freely in the 1970s.

And as you can see below of the popular gold-backed SPDR Gold Trust ETF (GLD), it’s in the middle of a seasonally bullish window right now.

Predictive Alpha is also bullish on gold over the short term.

The 19-Day model for GLD indicates a projected move of about 6% by Feb. 23.

Historically, this projection hits its mark 85% of the time – another solid batting average.

Seasonal Advantage is the next big step for our software…

TradeSmith has spent years studying seasonality and building out tools to help you isolate the most consistent seasonal windows.

But we understand not everyone wants a DIY approach to finding these seasonality patterns.

That’s why we created our Seasonal Edge service. It’s designed to capitalize on the top seasonal patterns on stocks in the S&P 500. But importantly, it only recommends trades when those stocks are showing the right underlying momentum conditions.

And this year, we’ve taken it a step further with our Seasonal Advantage strategy.

Instead of trading individual windows across the year, it distills that research into a rotating portfolio of the five best seasonal trades at that moment.

Each month, the system scans the market for the strongest seasonal opportunities ahead. Then it selects the five best setups – balancing win rate, timing, and risk – and updates the portfolio accordingly.

The portfolio is purely quantitative. There’s no guesswork. No reacting to headlines. Just a rules-based approach that focus on the five best seasonal opportunities.

Our first Seasonal Advantage recommendations go out on Feb. 12. And today is the final day to secure access before the portfolio goes live.

So if you’re interested in learning more about how to use this automated strategy as part of your own trading plan, go here for more details.

The Best Dates to Buy and Sell Silver in 2026