Happy Sunday, GoldBuzzers!

Welcome to the final part of our series on managing your risk in precious metals. Over the past three Sundays we've worked through gold, silver, and the gold miners, and a clear pattern has emerged: the deeper into the sector you go, the more punishing the drawdowns become.

Today we reach the most extreme market of the four. Silver miners. Buy-and-hold here delivered an 83% drawdown, the worst of the entire series. And the simple risk management rule that rescued gold miners last week stops working altogether.

I love silver. It’s the metal I have the longest connection with, but the silver miners market can punish buy-and-hold investors like no other.

Ok. Let’s get into it. ⬇️

Gold closed out the week around $4,542 after bouncing sharply off two-month lows around $4,380 hit mid-week, when fresh US-Iran military flare-ups sent the dollar spiking. The recovery came on two fronts: April PCE inflation data on Thursday landed broadly in line with expectations, cooling fears of an accelerated Fed tightening cycle, and reports emerged that US and Iranian negotiators had reached a preliminary memorandum of understanding for a 60-day ceasefire extension - though President Trump has yet to sign off. Despite the late-week rally, gold is still tracking a roughly 1% decline for May, weighed down by sticky inflation and growing acceptance that rates are going nowhere until well into 2027.

Silver followed a similar pattern, trading above $75 and holding onto a modest monthly gain of about 2%, though the bullish case took a hit this month after UBS slashed its 2026 silver supply deficit forecast by 80% - from 300 million ounces down to just 60-70 million - citing weaker solar panel demand and falling ETF holdings.

The bottom line: both metals are caught between geopolitical tailwinds and a Fed that remains firmly on hold, with the Iran situation and next month's inflation readings likely to set the tone heading into summer.

This is the final piece in our four part series, and it covers the most punishing market of all four.

Over the past three Sundays I've shared the mistakes that taught me everything I know about precious metals. The silver I bought in 1,000-ounce bars from my local bank was the right call; holding it without a plan as it ran from $10 to $48 and back down was not. Great Basin Gold, the gold mining stock I rode all the way to zero. The drawdowns I sat through with no plan and no risk management, operating on instinct and watching the news.

My approach is very different today.

If you haven’t caught the other pieces, it’s worth a catch up. Part 1 covered owning gold, Part 2 covered silver and Part 3 last Sunday covered the gold miners.

Of all the precious metals, silver is the one I have the strongest affinity with. Over the years I’ve bought far more physical silver than gold. I like its history, its industrial demand, its role as the affordable entry point into hard money. I still hold a core position in physical silver today.

In Part 2, I made a point that applies with even greater force here. A drawdown in a brokerage account is much harder to bear than a decline in the value of physical metal sitting in a safe. When you log in and watch a number fall week after week, month after month, it takes an emotional toll that few people can withstand. Physical silver in your possession doesn’t flash a red number at you every morning. Silver mining stocks do.

And silver mining stocks fall harder than almost anything else in the precious metals universe.

Silver miners combine three layers of risk. They have the volatility of silver itself, which we saw in Part 2 was already worse than gold. They add the operational risk of mining companies, which we saw in Part 3 can destroy even a well-promoted business entirely. And they add leverage on top of both. When silver moves, silver miners move further. When silver crashes, silver miners crash harder.

The most common way to hold the sector is through SIL, the Global X Silver Miners ETF, the largest silver mining fund in the world with around $5 billion assets under management.

It holds a basket of the major silver producers, so it spreads the company-specific risk that took down individual names like the one I described in Part 3. A diversified basket should be safer than a single stock. And it is. But the data shows it’s still the most brutal ride of any market in this series.

SIL launched in April 2010. Buy and hold from inception through the end of 2025 earned an annualised return of just 5.3%. Meanwhile, the maximum drawdown over that period was an eye watering 82.9%.

That’s the worst drawdown of all four markets in this series. Here’s the full progression:

Gold’s worst drawdown was 45%. Silver’s was 75%. Gold miners (GDX) reached 80%. Silver miners (SIL): 83%. Each market in the series has been harder to hold than the last, and silver miners sit at the bottom of the pile. An investor who bought SIL near its 2011 peak watched more than four-fifths of their capital disappear and waited years to recover.

That 5.3% annual return, for all that pain, is barely better than holding cash in a decent savings account over parts of that period. The leverage that makes silver miners exciting on the way up made buy-and-hold a losing proposition on a risk-adjusted basis over the full cycle.

As with gold miners, the full-cycle record hides what the sector does during its bullish phases. And silver miners, because of their extra leverage, can deliver the most explosive upside of any market we’ve covered.

When silver runs, silver miners run hardest of all. The same amplification that produces the 83% drawdowns produces the sector’s spectacular rallies. The challenge, exactly as with gold miners, isn’t whether the upside is real. It’s whether you can be present for the rallies and absent for the collapses. In a sector this volatile, that timing problem is the whole game.

For the systems comparison, I’ve used the 2014-2025 window. This is the period over which the GoldBuzz INSIDER silver miner systems have a live track record, because the systems need several years of historical data to generate their signals. Running every approach over the identical window keeps the comparison honest. (The full-history figures above, including the 83% drawdown, come from SIL’s complete record since 2010.)

As you can see, the simple filters perform very unevenly on silver miners, and worse than they did on gold miners.

Most striking of all, the 55-day breakout rule, the one approach that genuinely rescued gold miners in Part 3, fails on silver miners and actually produced a small loss.

The 200 day moving average and 10-month moving average both produced much better returns for the time they were in the market, compared with buy and hold.

Next let’s look at drawdowns.

The 10-month moving average was the best of them, cutting the worst drawdown from 65 to 46.5%. The 200-day moving average reduced the drawdown only marginally, to 63.7%, though it improved returns per day of exposure. The 50/200 crossover actually made things worse, with a 70.3% drawdown and almost no return.

On gold miners, the 55-day breakout rule cut the drawdown from 80.6% to 39.6%, roughly in half. On silver miners, the same rule produced a small loss and reduced the drawdown only to 64.5%. The workaround that saved you one market ago stops working here.

This is the lesson of the series in a single data point. Each market is harder than the last, and the simple tools that helped earlier in the series run out of road by the time you reach silver miners. There is no easy moving average or breakout rule that turns silver miners into a comfortable hold. The sector is too volatile, too prone to sharp reversals, for a single mechanical rule to manage.

Even with the INSIDER systems, the silver miners were challenging. The Max Return system produced the best overall returns (16.4% CAGR) almost double buy and hold’s 8.9% but still endured a 62% drawdown.

This is where a properly built systematic risk management approach separates itself from everything else, and it does so most dramatically on the hardest market of the four.

The GoldBuzz INSIDER Min Risk strategy for silver miners posted an exposure-adjusted CAGR of 50.9% with a maximum drawdown of 30.1%, over the same 2014-2025 window. In comparison, the Max Return strategy posted 16.4% annualised with a 62.0% drawdown. The full methodology and trading profile of both are on the silver miners systems page.

If you look at all the data objectively, the INSIDER Min Risk numbers for the silver miners are the best example of the entire series, which is the reason I personally use it for my own silver miner holdings. On the most volatile market of the four, the strategy delivered the lowest drawdown of any approach (30.1%, less than half of buy-and-hold’s 65% over the same window) while generating an exposure-adjusted return of over 50%, far above anything the simple filters could produce.

It achieves this by being highly selective (only invested around a quarter of the time) when momentum is confirmed across multiple timeframes, and sitting in cash the rest of the time. In a sector defined by catastrophic drawdowns, staying out is most of the battle.

The trade-off chart shows it clearly. The simple filters and buy-and-hold cluster together in the high-drawdown region on the left. The INSIDER systems sit apart, especially Min Risk which sits alone in the top right corner: the highest return per unit of exposure and the lowest drawdown on the chart.

The reasons to own silver miners haven’t gone away. When silver runs, this sector produces some of the most powerful returns available anywhere in the precious metals space. With the structural forces behind precious metals still firmly in place, including $39 trillion in US debt and central banks accumulating gold at record rates, there is every reason to want exposure to the sector’s upside. The question, as always, isn’t whether to own it. It’s how.

And silver miners answer that question more forcefully than any of the previous three markets. With gold, a simple moving average rule got you most of the way. With silver, it helped but left you exposed. With gold miners, you needed a less common breakout rule to make real progress. With silver miners, even that stops working. By the time you reach the most volatile market in the series, the simple tools have run out, and a properly systematic approach is the only thing the data supports.

That’s the thread running through each of the past four weeks. Precious metals have generated strong returns over the long run, and the case for owning them is as compelling as it has been in decades. But every one of these markets, gold, silver, gold miners, and silver miners, has delivered drawdowns deep enough to break the conviction of most investors who held passively. The deeper you go into the sector, from bullion to miners, from gold to silver, the more punishing the drawdowns become and the more essential risk management is.

I learned that the hard way, market by market, over years of mistakes that cost me real money. The whole point of this series, and of everything I’ve built since, is so that you don’t have to learn it the same way.

Thank you for reading this series. If it’s prompted you to think differently about how you hold precious metals, it’s done its job.

That’s all for this Sunday, folks. See you on Tuesday.

Before you go, please take a moment to rate today’s newsletter and tell us how we did.

Rick Adams
Founder, GoldBuzz
rick@goldbuzz.com