Commodities: “Silver running wild”

With prices doubling this year and new records being set, silver is even outperforming its “big brother” gold. However, gold has also seen a 60 percent increase. The price of copper has also risen to a new all-time high.

4 December 2025. FRANKFURT (Deutsche Börse). It's not just gold that's shining this year; the price of silver has risen even more sharply. Yesterday, Wednesday, the price reached a new record high of almost US$59 per ton. This means that the price has doubled since the beginning of the year. “Silver is going wild,” comments Ulrich Stephan, chief investment strategist at Deutsche Bank.

Gold is trading at $4,188 per troy ounce on Thursday morning – a 60 percent increase since the beginning of the year, but still well below the all-time high of $4,380 reached in October. One reason for the precious metal boom is the high probability of a US interest rate cut next week. This would make interest-free precious metals more attractive in comparison. In the case of silver, scarce inventories and high inflows into silver ETCs are also contributing factors.

Gold at $4,900?

LBBW believes that the precious metals boom is not over yet. “Many important arguments in favor of gold and other precious metals remain valid,” explains analyst Frank Schallenberger. “Interest rates in the US will continue to fall, questions remain about the future independence of the Fed and the strength of the US dollar, and US trade policy is likely to continue to surprise the markets in 2026.” However, he believes that silver is unlikely to continue to outperform. “This is contradicted by the weak global economy and the fact that silver is heavily dependent on industrial demand.” Goldman Sachs even expects the price of gold to reach US$4,900 next year, driven by extensive gold purchases by central banks and interest rate cuts by the US Federal Reserve.

Lots going on in ETC trading

In November, inflows into precious metal ETCs continued, albeit to a lesser extent than in previous months, as reported by Mobeen Tahir from issuer WisdomTree. According to Ivo Orlemann from ICF Bank, there is also a lot going on in precious metal ETC trading. Recently, ICF customers have been particularly interested in Invesco Physical Gold (IE00B579F325), WisdomTree Physical Silver (JE00B1VS3333), and WisdomTree Silver 3x Daily Leveraged (IE00B7XD2195). According to Orlemann, the latter has “exploded” due to the sharp rise in silver prices. Xetra Gold's gold reserves have risen again this year and currently stand at 173.5 tons, up from 167 tons at the end of 2024. At the end of 2023, however, they still stood at 199 tons.

Copper also at a new all-time high

However, silver is not the only candidate for a record high. The price of copper reached almost US$11,500 this week – a new all-time high. The reason for this is production losses in key producing countries. Zinc and aluminum prices also rose, while the price of nickel fell.

Swiss bank UBS forecasts that copper will rise to US$13,000 by 2026. The drivers are supply bottlenecks and strong demand from future technologies such as data centers, electric cars, and power grids. In recent weeks, industrial metal ETCs have seen net inflows, according to WisdomTree.