Transcription
While everyone's been obsessing over AI stocks, something historic is happening in the silver market that almost nobody's talking about. We're looking at potentially the perfect storm scenario that could send silver to levels most people think are absolutely impossible. $500 is being talked about and by the end of this video, you'll understand exactly why this is not fantasy and what you can actually do about it.
My name is Felix Freedom. I'm an ex-investment banker and economist. And this is Winston back there who does all the smart thinking and all the research around here. We're also the founders of the Goat Academy where my mentors, my retired Wall Street mentors, teach regular investors institutional strategies that I'm going to give you a glimpse of here today. We've taught well over 20,000 students over the last six years.
I'm also the co-founder of trademvision.io where we get our data and our news from. also going to share some of that with you because that's where a lot of the inspo of this video comes from. And our mission is very simple. Take the strategies that the hedge funds, the investment banks use to, you know, print money and then translate them for normal people like us who might actually have friends. And right now, this very silver market reminds me of things I've seen in the past. And this could be one of the biggest wealth building opportunities of your lifetime if done right and if done responsibly.
So let's zoom out for a second. Let me give you some perspective that'll change how you think about commodities, things like silver and gold. Commodities just emerged from a 45 year bare market from 1980 until very recently. things like metals and oil and agricultural products, they've been in a decline while stocks and real estate went to, you know, the moon. And most investors still alive today have never experienced a true commodity bull market. So, we are all children of a bare market and therefore we don't expect these commodities to re go up a lot because everybody out there believes stocks go up 10% a year, right? That's what they do. That's what we've been told. But but what nobody tells you is that commodity bull markets can last decades, 15, 20, 30 years. So while mainstream media and your financial advisor tells you that gold and silver is a barbarous relic, um you make jewelry from there might be a different story here that I think you deserve to understand.
Now there are several parts to this perfect storm. Let me break them down for you one by one. The first part is currency debasement. Central banks have printed more money in the last few years than all of human history combined. It's just so fun. Imagine if you had a money printer. I'd be just darling, just a little bit. Just print a few thousand. Just just just Oh, okay. Just do 10,000. Oh, let's do 100,000 more. Why do we do a million? A million. Why do we do 10, you know? That's kind of what happens in central bankers minds. Same story. The amount of money out there as in US dollars has increased about eightfold over the last 20 years. And while you think multinational media tells you, "Oh no, no, we're not doing that anymore. We were done with all the money printing, look at look at this chart here. This is from the Fed. Fred is their friend, their in-house data source. And what does this show you? This shows you the money that's being injected essentially into banks to keep them alive." And this is money printing. Now, they don't call it money printing. They call it Treasury securities purchased by the Federal Reserve and the temporary open market. Boring, right? It's money printing. And maybe you think that isn't a lot. Well, literally just last week, it was 18 billion. Maybe that isn't a lot. But look all the way back to 2021, there wasn't any or virtually none. Well, what if we include CO? Yeah, CO was the most bonkers money printing in the history of mankind. I mean, Emperor Nero is like the guy said, "What? What?" And that's the guy who took the silver coin from 100% silver to like 1% silver basically or 3% silver. This was insanity. But if you just zoom out a bit more, right before this crazy co thing, we had very little of that in the 2000s, the um we had some of that to bail out the dot bubble. But look at these levels that even the very height of 2006 it was 11 billion injected there. We've just done three times that and apparently there is no crisis. So this tells you something that mainstream media isn't telling you about. So essentially they're printing money again but they'd really rather not tell you about it. Now what does money printing do? It makes dollars worth less. That's so we're looking at hard things like commodities, silver, gold, the shiny stuff.
And the second part of this is that there is a ddollarization. The BRICS nations are building alternatives to the dollar. They've launched a pilot for a gold anchored currency. It's called the unit. Central banks are buying gold, more than almost 900 tons last year, double the usual average.
And then three, we actually have a physical shortage. And we're going to dive into this a little bit more in depth because this is really important to understand and most people don't really understand what the heck we actually do with silver. The silver market is literally heading into its sixth year in a row of a supply deficit. So do you understand what that means? For six years straight, the world has used more silver than it has produced. That means there is a gap. That gap is now 800 million ounces, which is almost an entire years of mining production. So where that silver come from? Well, inventories, stockpiles that have been building up for many, many decades. These are starting to Yeah. run very low.
I built a tool for you guys. It's called better stocks, but it's got a big metals intel section, and you can track your own metals. I just imported some stuff here. Um, but it's actually a very very cool feature because you can literally scan. So, you can upload like purchase receipts or spreadsheets or whatever you however you track it. Um, and it'll then track it for you, which is very cool. But let's get into the market intel here. And you can see the amount of silver that is available at COMX, the silver exchange, has fallen to just 88 million, which sounds like a lot, but it isn't because in March last year, it was 120 million. So, we've lost 30% of inventory, and it's running out very, very, very quickly. That's an interesting story. 70% down on US warehouse inventory since 2020. London vaults have lost about 40% of their holdings. Shanghai inventories are at a decade low. And the math really does not lie. If you're taking more out than you're putting in, eventually guess what? You're going to run out. Exactly.
And maybe you're thinking, but Felix, if if silver is at such high prices, why did the miners just made more? Which is a great question. It's a dirty secret of the silver market. The silver is mostly a byproduct. About 70% of silver comes as a byproduct of mining copper, zinc, and lead. So miners can't just turn up the silver production. They're mining other things. And silver comes along for the ride. So even if silver prices double or triple, you can't rapidly increase supply because you'd be sitting on a ton of lead and copper and other things and zinc that you might not actually want. Plus, it takes 8 to 12 years to actually build a mine. So, from discovery to production, you're looking at a decade plus of permitting, feasibility studies, you know, talking to the local toad community, see if they're up for, you know, that kind of thing. Um, so there's no quick fix of like gold supply or silver supply is just going to jump out of the ground. And the all grates are declining. So, a lot of the easy silver has actually been found. What does that mean? Well, miners are getting less silver per ton of rock. They're getting out of the ground than they used to. So, the easy silver is already on the surface.
And then there is the China story and that should have been front page news everywhere, but it sort of got buried. China at the beginning of this year implemented export restrictions on refined silver. They classified it as a strategic material, the same category as rare earths. And what does that mean? You need a special government license to now export it. Now, why does it matter? China controls 60 to 70% of the world's refined silver supply. So you basically removed 70% of the global supply of silver from international markets, which again creates a supply shock, you would think. Why have they done that? Well, they want to be able to build their own solar panels and EVs and electronics rather than send it overseas.
Now, before we continue, if you want to stay informed of what's happening in the gold and silver markets beyond this video today, I actually have something for you which is free. Uh we send out every single day a newsletter that breaks down really in depth what actually happens at Comx and the world of gold and silver. It's completely free. You can go to felix.org/metals, I think, and just sign up for it. There's a weekly one. There's also an option for a for a for a daily one. Both are free. uh and I know that some 20 30,000 of you already subscribed to that which is very very cool.
Now if you then want to learn well how do we actually decide what to buy when to buy do we buy gold do we buy silver do we buy stocks do we buy miners is there some other beneficiary to this well if you want to learn that then this video would be very very long if I included it here so instead I'm going to run for you a live training session this coming weekend um on literally Wall Street's rules on how to pick stocks the same stuff that I learned from my Wall Street mentors um that training is available for sign up at felixfriends.org/training /training. Both links are down below in the description.
Why do I say that in a in a in a Spanish accent? Well, most silver seems to also come from Mexico. Mexico. Uh, which seems to be going through some hoo-ha at present. Um, now we've covered supply, right? There is some constraint there. Well, what what about demand? Well, this is where the silver story becomes unique. Silver isn't just a shiny metal. It is an industrial metal. It is the most conductive element on the periodic table. Do you remember sitting in in in school and they had that horrible periodic table and it was really really really really boring and it gave you a headache and all that. That's the one and the silver is on that and it's the most thing that conducts energy better than anything else. So where does it go? Well, solar panels which obviously well they conduct energy because they create it um they require about 25% of the annual global solar supply. Electric vehicles use about 2 ounces of silver in the sensors and the wiring and the modules, 60 or 70% more than a traditional gas guzzler. And then don't even get me started on AI centers and so on because they also need high efficiency electrical components as they call it, all the thermal management, the heat stuff, all that stuff. But there's also other lovely stuff, cloud seeding, you know, the stuff that poisons you from above. Sorry. It makes our food supply more uh sustainable. I think I think that was that was the phrasing I was looking for. Um nuclear power, you know, the clean energy, the the homes clean energy. Um control rods in nuclear reactors or silver smartphones. Yeah. Yeah. These these things here. Um, and basically every piece of electronic device you own, medical equipment, um, 5G infrastructure, semiconductors, batteries, water purification, photography, mirrors and glass, um, I could go on, right? Um, antibacterial textiles. You got one of these, you know, non smelling shirts or something or these sort of silver line things that keep you hot. Well, guess what? There's silver in that.
And so unlike gold, which is primary I want to horn it. I like it, you know, kind of kind of type metal. Um although it is actually used funnily enough in um this very microphone. Let me show you. See that guys? See the little top there? That one there? Bit fuzzy. Bit fuzzy. You get the idea now. There we go. You see that little bit of gold there? That's gold plating. Why? It's very very good for conducting apparently my lovely voice which I'm told is quite grating and irritated by some. Let me know down below in the comments what you make of it. But yeah, gold is mostly hoarded. Silver actually gets consumed. It is used up and the demand is inelastic. Oh dear, the economist got his fancy word out. What does inelastic mean? It means it doesn't really change all that much. if prices go up. So if you have a higher price of silver, excuse my handwriting, this is a little bit sort of delayed as I'm writing this, which is quite irritating. As the price goes up, usually we consume less of it, right? Except crack cocaine apparently. But with silver, it's a bit like crack cocaine. prices can go up and it's still going to get consumed because you're still going to make the solar panel, you're still going to make the car and it doesn't really matter that much what it costs. Now, at some point, prices will get so high that people will look for other materials. That's of course true, but that's going to take a long time.
Now, there is another problem. You lot, who owns a silver ETF? Do you own any of those things? you know, silver ETFs that actually buy the physical. Um, well, guess what? They're consuming about well, a lot. 134 million ounces last year. And that then just goes into a vault and it sits there because silver ETF people generally tend to own them for quite a long period of time. And then you've got the emerging central banks in Russia, India, Saudi Arabia and so on. They've also started accumulating silver as a strategic asset. So silver is not jewelry. Um governments are treating it like a strategic reserve. And then on top of that we have the lunatics of Wall Street who are trading this stuff and they essentially make up a contract that is meant to represent an ounce of silver but they can make a lot of these contracts. It's a bit like the central banker going just print one more. Who will know? Right. So, at the moment, there are about 365 contracts for one physical ounce of silver. So, what do these contracts really mean? Well, I can buy a contract on the COMX. And I can then say to them, my dear COMX, I would like the physical silver. And they will look at me and they say, are you mad? And I say, yes, but it's in the contract. I'm entitled to the physical silver, so hand it over. And they then have to do that. And that is why in our little community here, uh, we watch on the indicator how much silver there is because people are clearly doing that because the amount of silver there is getting less and less and less and less and less and less and less, right? Gold, same story. We're running very, very low on these. When that runs out, things get very, very interesting, don't they, Winston? He seems pretty relaxed about the whole thing, doesn't he?
Okay, so let's talk about the path to $500. Is that a crazy number? Well, it's not as crazy as it sounds when you understand the maths. The gold silver ratio tells you how many ounces of silver it takes to buy one ounce of gold. How much silver do I need to buy gold? And again, that's something we track. Here it is. This is a gold silver ratio. At the moment, it's about 60 59 as I'm recording this. You know, it'll tell you this every single day in there. There's there's a link to this down below for this. This is actually we we we charge for this. This is $27 because we got to pay for all the data. and so on. Uh if you want to get the newsletter that will keep you informed for free every single day, there's an option to then also acquire this. You could just try it out and cancel it if you don't like it. There's a link down below. It's, as I said, it's 27 bucks.
So, let me give you some context. In the Roman Empire there, you needed 12 pieces of silver for one piece of gold. In the US in 1792, by law, it was 15 to1. In the 1980s, it was 17 to1. Right now, it's 60 to1. And actually, silver has outperformed gold recently. the ratios compressed. So silver is already outperforming gold. The ratio came down from like 80 or 100 which mean meant silver was very cheap, right? But historically the ratio has been much much lower. So if we go back to just like 2011 and we take gold price at the moment, say it's about $5,000 give or take, we would get to $167 on silver, right? If it's goes to the 15 to1 ratio, which is literally the historical average, we would get to 333 O. Now, if the ratio hits the more extreme levels, which we haven't seen for a long time, 10 to1, we get to 500 bucks. So, the bullish case is that gold, this is assuming gold at 5,000. Gold goes up, silver goes up with it. Now, gold could easily hit six or $7,000. And at $6,000, you wouldn't need a 10 to1. You would just need a 12 to1 ratio if I was allowed to write. I'm not allowed to write apparently. I am very sad about that. No, the pen says no. No more scribbling, Felix. Um, yeah. So, you'd get to a different different pen tool. 12 to1 would work at gold of $6,000. Now, gold might well reach $7,000. You get the idea, right?
And when you look at what the big money is doing, I mean the really big money, the central banks, right? The ones who print money. Imagine, imagine you could print money as much as you wanted and buy anything with it. Well, your central bank, they've been buying gold at record levels. Poland, Kazakhstan, Brazil, Turkey, China, everyone's adding to their reserves. 90% of central banks expect those reserves to keep going up. And we've already hit the gold price targets of sort of $5,000 that you know JP Morgan said we'd hit by the end of the year. Well, we're already there, right? So, this is happening faster than expected. And many people are now talking about six and $7,000 plus gold prices.
And let me show you another piece of data that you probably wouldn't normally see. If I go into trade vision here and I go into the end of the year up here, December 2026, this gives me a live insight into the options market. And I scroll down and what do I see? I see here that there is the great big green middle finger at 8:30. What does that mean? This is on the GLD, which is the ETF on gold. Um, trades at about a tenth of gold, more or less. Um, so this $830 is a bet on this is a quite a big bet too on gold reaching you know 9 $8,000 $9,000 plus by the end of the year. Now the volume is so large that to me that looks like institutions because it's 3,000 call options. How much would that cost to buy those? Let me see. It's 3,200 there. Let's try that. 3,200. That would cost what's that? $1.7 million. And the likelihood of it happening by maths is 0%. But obviously somebody thinks it's worth putting $1.7 million on that. So it's kind of an interesting example of data that shows you what institutions are doing being really really useful. That's one of the the purposes of of uh trade vision. I'll also put a link down to that below if you want to want to check that out.
And if you look at mining stocks, they tell us quite similar stories. Major gold and silver producers like Newund and Barrack, they're trading at really, really, really low valuations like PE's, you know, price over earnings of sort of 11 to 13, which is kind of value growth territory, very stock territory. Um, and the the general silver valuations are as low as they were in like the sort of so you can literally buy a gold and silver miner for the valuation of a utility except that the product they're getting out of the ground is doubling in price.
Now what's the real opportunity here and I want to come put a warning out. I'm not a financial adviser. I'm not a registered investment advisor. I'm not registered for anything uh or qualified for anything other than you know um that guy he's very qualified Winston. Um but if silver goes to 500 or even 100 or 150 or something the leveraged play is mining stocks. If you look at the 1979 1980 sort of silver mania and I really used the word mania there with some purpose. Let me show you this the 7989 mania. These are major minors and look at the returns these guys are coming out with like thousands of percent right 13,000% 3,000 1,000 3,000 2,000 again promising you returns past performances in the fence of future performance but during that last precious metals rally the junior mining stocks delivered ridiculous returns right really really ridiculous and even the worst performers in that group still literally the worst performer up delivered 233% It's not not bad, right? And if you adjust these valuations for inflation, well, they actually look even cheaper.
So, let me give you a little bit of a primer on miners because there is a lot of risk with these. One of the most important things, of course, with miners is small position sizing and really, really good risk management. Automated risk management. That's really really the key thing because a mining stock will lose money over the cycle. There is a cycle to imagine this is the silver price, right? And say we are say we're here. Yeah, let's just assume this is now what's going to happen to the price of mining stocks. Well, say this is the mining stock price. So, they'll do go up a little bit slower and then they go up a lot. I mean, really a lot. and then they go down really really a lot and then they do it again and then they do it again. So it is something that you want to trade not something you want to own forever. Do not fall in love with the mining companies.
So what do we look for? We want to look for mining friendly countries um Canada, Australia, US. Uh you want to look for high-grade deposits, proven reserves management that actually has a track record. So people who've actually built mines before, not just, you know, some lunatic who used to mine crypto in his basement and things. This sounds like it's the same thing, don't you think? Um, no, not those. So if you want more kind of safeish, and I should probably shouldn't use the word safe in relation to miners, but the bigger ones, the major producers are people like Newmont and Barrack. They offer lower risk, but still upside. Um, there is an ETF for this which is called SIL, for example. There are obviously others. I'm not selling anything uh in terms of I never endorse a particular company or ETF or I don't take money from anybody there. No sponsorships on this this channel. We don't need it. We don't want it. Um, but these guys are trading at 2016 valuations literally bottom of the market valuations even though their margins are exploding. So you could also look at the entire sector rather than at individual stocks.
So what's the framework? Let me give you a framework. This is my humble opinion. You got to come to your own conclusion as usual. Stay informed, get yourself the free newsletter, maybe even join the community to monitor things live and and if you really want to take things further and learn how to pick these stocks, how to pick these miners and which ones and and when and when to get in and out and so on, join me live on the weekend at felix.org/train.
So, if you want to be really really diversified, um you could be 25% in physical metals, hard gold, silver, 25% in real estate. that requires a certain amount of money to be able to do that, but it's something to do. I'd still be in stocks and the liquid part I would cross out. I would not be 25% liquid. Why not? If they're printing money at a rate of 8 9% a year, uh the market goes up almost 20% a year at present. Guess what? You're losing your money is losing about 20% a year. And I always say this to people and they go, "Oh, copy copy. Inflation 2%. This government has been telling me this." Yes. And yes, you can choose whatever you believe in, but just think about it, right? Don't measure inflation on the basis of government data. That's what I would say to you. U find another asset class and see how much that's going up by because that's really what it's all about.
So, what's the advantage over physical versus paper, you know, ETFs versus versus the hard stuff or physical silver, you actually own it. You have no risk in the sense of uh someone is going to default on it or something. But ETFs are very convenient. you can just click a button, which is cool, but you don't really own the metal. Um, some ETFs keep physical metal in their vaults, but you're kind of you can't knock on the door and say, "Can I please pick it up?" You know, then they're not going to give it to you. And then you have mining stocks which give you leverage, higher riskreward. We've been in and out of mining stocks since May, I think, of 2025. And again, I share all those things, but the people in my um our mentoring program, that's a bit more higher level and so on and maybe not be for everybody, but we we share it in there. Why do I share with everybody? Because I think uh it's dangerous. And my purpose here isn't just to give you like random little stock picks because you will fall on your face at some point if you haven't got if you don't understand why you're in it. You haven't got risk management, you haven't got, you know, proper system set up. So risk management is really where you keep the money, right? So never invest money you can't afford to lose. Mining stocks are going to go down 50% regularly. You got to be comfortable with that. So, you got to make your positions pretty small, right? If it's 1% of your portfolio and it goes down 50%, you've lost 0.5%. Which you probably won't notice. This is if you have a 1% position. Now, if you have a 20% position and it goes down 50%, you're now 10% and you're now crying, right? We want to avoid that. It's really, really not something you want to be doing. Um, now are there some risks to this story? Look, I'm very bullish on this in the short term. Doesn't mean I'm putting all my money into it, but it's something that I'm monitoring carefully and sort of drift in and out of the the miners and so on. And then physical stuff is different. That's something you put in a private secured vault somewhere where it's protected and insured. But if prices stay really really high for a really long period of time, the industrial demand will decline. They will find alternatives. When the pain is strong enough, we find alternatives. And if for some reason we got a strong dollar, at the moment we got a weak dollar, that wouldn't be good. If we get deflation, that wouldn't be good. I think it's fairly unlikely given how much money the lunatics running the asylum are printing. If you just look at, you know, the money printing here of the last couple of weeks, but doesn't mean it can't happen.
So bottom line, to bring it all together, we're emerging from a 45 year bare market. sixth year of not enough silver out there. China 70% of refining um manufacturing is basically withdrawn from global markets. The demand is exploding at the same time because everything is now electric. Um and I think mining stocks are still undervalued. So I think there is a potential here for a bigly move but it also comes with some significant risk. So what do you do next? Well stay informed. Grab grab yourself our free newsletter. And then secondly, join me on Saturday for the free live training. That is not a metals training. That is a how do we pick potentially winning things training and that'll apply to stocks, to mining stocks, to gold and silver, to absolutely anything. And I'll walk you through that at felix.org/training. And if you got some value out of this, oh, grab those two things and maybe even share it with a friend or a golden retriever. Winston, I say thank you for watching and we wish you a glorious, successful 2026.
Wall Street's panicking and most Americans have no idea why. Japan's debt just collapsed and it's about to hit your portfolio harder than you think. Right as I'm recording.