The price of silver set a new all-time high today (9 October), passing $50 per troy ounce for the first time in its history.
Silver’s rally often follows gold, which performed well throughout 2024, hitting new all-time highs and beating several of the major equities indices including the S&P 500. This week, the gold price finally reached a new high, exceeding the $4,000 mark.
But the price of silver has increased 60% so far in 2025, outpacing even gold price gains during that period and reaching its highest level in over a decade.
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Silver’s historic all-time high price was $49.45 per ounce, which was hit back in 1980. Silver prices came close to this in 2011, when the price of silver briefly hit $49.54 per ounce.
On 9 October, the price of silver briefly hit $51.2, the all-time highest silver price in history. Silver prices have risen over 30% over the past month alone.
“Silver has managed to renew its membership in the all-time high club, finally joining gold after its surge today that took it through the peaks seen in the mad rally of 2011,” said Chris Beauchamp, chief market analyst at IG.
Silver prices tend to benefit when gold gains in value, especially to the extent that the yellow metal has of late. When the gold trade becomes crowded, investors often turn to silver as an alternative.
But demand for silver is primarily driven by industrial use cases. It is fundamental to many aspects of modern technologies, such as solar panels and artificial intelligence (AI).
Why invest in silver?
The investment case for silver is distinct from gold. While it is also a precious metal with a rich history of usage in coinage, in the modern era it is silver’s industrial qualities that have the greatest bearing on its price.
“Historically, there would have been a closer relationship between silver and gold in their end uses,” Robert Crayfourd, portfolio manager of the Golden Prospect Precious Metals investment trust, told MoneyWeek. “But today, silver is over 50% industrial, and that’s primarily going into high-end electronics.”
Anything you can see around you with an on/off switch likely contains silver. Other industrial use cases include brazing and alloys, the chemicals industry and medical equipment – the latter benefiting from the fact that bacteria cannot grow on silver, an inert ‘noble’ metal.
For these reasons, silver sometimes tracks action in copper prices more than gold.
All of that said, many of the same drivers that impact the gold price – financial stress, interest rates, inflation expectations and policy decisions – also influence silver. “You can think of silver as gold on crack,” says Adrian Ash, director of research at BullionVault. “More irrational, more volatile, more dangerous; but also more fun if you’re looking for risk.”
Is silver a good investment now?
Silver is at the heart of boom industries like clean energy, AI and defence.
The rise of these industries is, potentially, contributing towards an imbalance of supply and demand for silver which should, over the medium term, be positive for the silver price, and make silver well worth investing in.
According to The Silver Institute, between 2016 and 2024 total annual demand for silver increased from 993.3 million ounces to 1.16 billion. Over the same period, supply fell from 1.06 billion ounces to 1.02 billion. In other words, where there was a surplus eight years ago, there is now a deficit.
The boom industries are the main drivers of increasing demand. Total industrial silver demand increased from 491 million ounces in 2015 to a record 680.5 million ounces in 2024. Electronics, particularly PV solar panels, is the largest driver of increasing industrial demand.
One thing to keep in mind when considering investing in silver, though, is its volatility. Futures and options speculators call it “the devil’s metal”, says Ash, on account of its propensity to make sudden, sharp moves just as they think they’ve figured it out.
Should you invest in silver or gold?
If you are considering investing in a precious metal like silver, you are probably also at least thinking about investing in gold.
The two metals function quite differently as investments. Gold lacks as many industrial applications as silver, but has historically been a more reliable store of value.
Their historical significance as precious metals used in coinage means that gold and silver are often directly compared by investors. The gold-silver ratio is reckoned to be the oldest continually-tracked financial ratio in existence. It describes how many ounces of silver are required to buy one ounce of gold.
The gold-silver ratio is approximately 79.4 at the time of writing, having fallen from as high as 104 in April at the height of tariff turmoil. Prior to this decade, anything above 80 would have been considered high, indicating that gold was overvalued and that it’s time to invest in silver.
But in recent years it has been more common for gold to trade at higher values relative to silver.
“Central banks have been the primary driver [of precious metal demand],” said Crayfourd. “Central banks are dealing with huge amounts of money and they want a lower volume, so gold is perfect… that has justified gold trading to a higher ratio.”
Will the silver price keep rising in 2025?
There are reasons to believe that silver could continue to gain in value, though it is a notably volatile asset.
"At present there is little reason to think the upward trajectory of the gold and silver prices will cease,” said Paul Syms, head of EMEA ETF fixed income and commodity product management at Invesco. “The narrative behind the precious metals rally has only been strengthened over the last month."
BullionVault surveys its customers twice per year to assess their expectations for gold and silver prices.
July’s survey of over 1,000 users showed substantial optimism, with respondents predicting the silver price will reach $41.18 per ounce by the end of 2025, 42.4% above where it started the year. The latest silver price gains have taken it well beyond that level already.
Gold Bank London, a UK buyer of gold and silver, reported that silver purchases had more than doubled in the year to August 2025.
First-time buyers accounted for 71% of silver purchases during that period.
“Investment trends are showing that silver is a highly attractive proposition right now, and especially for first time investors, even though silver prices are continuing to surge,” said Faisel Ali, founder and managing director of Gold Bank London.
How to invest in silver
There are various ways to invest in silver.
You can, in theory, buy physical silver in the form of silver coins or bars. These, however, incur 20% VAT, and also include 10-15% dealing spreads on top.
“Silver’s popularity is likely to keep increasing, along with the demand for silver coins for investment and keepsake purposes,” said Ali. “Investors still lean towards bullion coins, but we are seeing more and more interest in themed and commemorative coins, so things that actually mean something to the buyer.”
Specialist custodians can enable you to avoid sales tax while cutting this trading spread too. Using a custodian should also save the expense and risk of storing and insuring physical silver on your own property, as they will normally store your silver in a professional level vault.
Alternatively, you can gain exposure to movements in silver prices by buying a physical silver exchange-traded commodity (ETC). An ETC behaves similarly to an ETF, but it tracks the spot price of a particular commodity, as opposed to a bundle of stocks. The iShares Physical Silver ETC (LON: ISLN), for example, tracks the spot price of silver.
Buying shares in silver miners is another way to invest in silver. However, bear in mind that this is a different and arguably riskier investment than in physical silver or a tracker for the spot price, because while changes in the silver price will impact the share prices of silver miners, they are also exposed to other, unrelated factors, such as company mismanagement.
A combination of both these approaches would be to buy an ETF which comprises silver miners, such as the Global X Silver Miners UCITS ETF (LON:SILV). While doing so may dilute some of the company risk associated with buying individual silver miners, this should still be considered a distinct play from investing in physical silver (either directly or via an ETC).
Golden Prospect Precious Metals (LON:GPM) is an investment trust that invests in a diverse portfolio of precious metal miners. As of 31 August, around 12.2% of its portfolio projects primarily mine silver, compared to 85.7% for gold, 1.1% for platinum group metals and 1% for base metals.
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