Silver hits its second steepest, plummeting 29.6% – London Business News | London Wallet

Gold has fallen 14.3% for UK investors since Thursday’s all-time high, its 3rd steepest plunge in history, while silver has made its second steepest ever drop, down 29.6%.

Adrian Ash, director of research at BullionVault − which cares today for £7.0 billon of precious metal for 125,000 users worldwide, said, “People tend to buy gold as investment insurance, hoping that it will perform well when other things do badly. But there are times when ‘safe haven’ gold can feel very unsafe indeed.

The killer inflation of the 1970s saw gold prices rise 20 times over and ended with gold spiking to $850 per ounce in January 1980. The price then crashed and kept falling until the year 2000. Gold didn’t break its 1980 high until 2007.

The Tech Stock Crash and financial crisis then saw gold rise 7-fold during the 2000s, surging to $1920 in autumn 2011 before falling hard and crashing in spring 2013. Gold didn’t recover its peak until the Covid pandemic in 2020.

Here in 2026, the breakdown in global trust and cooperation has driven gold and silver prices three times higher over the past five years. Given what’s happening in geopolitics, it’s hard to see that underlying bull market reversing course. The New Year’s spike clearly put gold and silver way ahead of their uptrends, but this historic price drop has only taken them back to what were new record highs this time last month.

That said, no one knows where prices will go from here, and if the action in precious metals prices is causing you concern, you might want to consider the size of your holdings. Gold is supposed to reduce your losses during a financial crisis. Anyone who fears that gold could put their own finances at risk should review their allocation.

Whether a correction or a crash, trading on BullionVault has leapt to fresh records, with Saturday and Sunday − when coin shops were shut and bullion-backed ETFs were closed along with the rest of the stock market − setting a new weekend high of more than £20 million changing hands in gold, silver, platinum and palladium. Buyers’ demand continues to match investor selling.”