SILVER SYSTEMS
Silver - Max Return Strategy
A highly responsive system built to capture silver's sharp, fast-moving price swings.
How This System Thinks
Silver is not gold. It's wilder, faster, and more punishing when it turns. A strategy that works for gold's measured pace would be too slow for silver's violent swings. This system was designed from the ground up for silver's temperament.
Our research found that silver's opportunities come in two flavours. The first is a weekly cyclical pattern - silver's tendency to overshoot during sell-offs before reversing sharply upward. This system catches those turning points with precision. The second is a daily measure of underlying strength - a fast-reading signal that detects when buyers are genuinely taking control, not just producing a dead-cat bounce.
The system responds to whichever pattern fires first. If the weekly cycle is turning or if daily strength is building, it gets invested. This makes it one of the most responsive systems in the portfolio, ensuring it's positioned early when silver starts to move. The cost is a higher trade count, but in a market as volatile as silver, being early matters more than being perfect.
Performance (2001–2025)
This system turned silver's wild nature into an advantage. A 15.3% annualised return versus buy-and-hold's 11.6% - while being invested only 61% of the time. That exposure-adjusted CAGR of 25.4% means each day of market exposure generated more than double the return of passive holding.
But the drawdown story is where it gets dramatic. Silver's worst peak-to-trough decline was a devastating 75% - the kind of loss that wipes out years of gains and breaks investor confidence. This system held its worst drawdown to 37%. Still painful, but recoverable. In silver, risk management isn't optional - it's survival.
Trading Profile
What To Expect
This is the most active system in the GoldBuzz portfolio. It averages nearly 11 trades per year with a typical position lasting about 15 days. If you want a quiet life, this isn't the one - but if you want to capture silver's explosive moves, the trade frequency is the price of admission.
There will be whipsaws. Silver's volatility means some entries will reverse before they gain traction. But the system's speed also means it exits quickly when conditions deteriorate, limiting the damage from any single trade. The longest it has sat idle is 55 days - less than two months.
Silver - Min Risk Strategy
A defensive strategy that tames silver's volatility by demanding confirmation across two timeframes.
How This System Thinks
Silver's biggest risk isn't missing a rally - it's getting caught in a crash. The metal has experienced drawdowns of 75% within the backtesting period, the kind of loss that takes a decade to recover from. This system was built with one overriding priority: don't be in the market when those crashes happen.
It reads silver on two different timeframes simultaneously. A fast daily signal measures whether buyers are genuinely in control right now. A slow monthly signal checks whether that buying pressure is part of a larger upward trend, not just a temporary bounce in a declining market.
The system only invests when both readings agree. The daily signal must confirm strength and the monthly signal must confirm trend before your capital is exposed. This makes it remarkably selective - invested less than a third of the time, only entering when short-term strength and long-term direction are both pointing up.
Performance (2001–2025)
The raw CAGR of 10.7% slightly trails buy-and-hold's 11.6%. But that comparison is misleading, because this system achieves it while being exposed to silver for only 31% of the time. The exposure-adjusted CAGR of 34.8% is extraordinary - it means every day your capital is deployed in silver, it's working three times harder than buy-and-hold.
The drawdown comparison is striking. Silver's worst decline was 75%. This system's worst was 30%. That's not incremental improvement - it's a fundamentally different experience of owning silver. Your capital spends 69% of its time safely in cash, completely shielded from silver's notorious volatility.
Trading Profile
What To Expect
This system trades about 6 times a year with an average position of just 13 days. Positions are short and sharp - it gets in when conditions are ideal and gets out quickly when they aren't.
The trade-off is patience. The longest idle stretch is over two years. There will be extended periods where silver is rising and this system is in cash, waiting for its dual confirmation. That's by design. When silver eventually turns - and it always does - you'll be glad you waited.
