Welcome back, GoldBuzzers.

I hope you all had a good Valentine's Day yesterday.

On the subject of relationships - today I want to talk about the one between you and your portfolio. I'm going to tell you about every dumb emotional mistake I've made in precious metals, and what I did about it. Grab a coffee (or a glass of wine, it's that kind of newsletter).

Ok. Let’s get into it!

After Thursday's gut-punch (gold down 3%+ in 15 minutes, silver getting absolutely rocked), the precious metals staged a Friday comeback that reminded everyone why you don't panic-sell into a forced liquidation. Gold clawed back above $5,050 while silver bounced over 3% above $77 - still nursing wounds from a brutal cross-asset selloff that saw investors dumping everything shiny to raise cash alongside equities and crypto.

The cavalry arrived in the form of softer-than-expected CPI data (2.4% annual, 2.5% core), which took some heat off Treasury yields and kneecapped the dollar. Translation: the Fed's "higher for longer" crowd just lost a few talking points, and rate cuts are looking more likely by mid-year.

Yes, it's been a wild February - silver's still down roughly 30% from its January moonshot above $120 - but the structural story hasn't changed: central banks keep stacking (China just extended their buying streak to 15 consecutive months), debt burdens keep climbing, and currency debasement concerns aren't going anywhere.

The long game is very much intact but volatility is the price of admission right now.

Investing in gold and silver isn’t just about charts and fundamentals; it’s a full-contact sport with your emotions. Picture this: You’re staring at your screen as silver plummets 10% in a day, and suddenly you’re questioning every life choice since buying that first ounce. Sound familiar? I hope so, because today we’re talking about the psychology of precious metals investing - and what I’ve spent four years doing about it.

Silver amplifies every market twitch - if gold sneezes, silver catches the flu and spikes a fever. Volatility? It’s not a bug; it’s a feature. But tell that to the investor who panic-sells at the bottom, only to watch prices moonshot the next week.

Then there’s the classic cycle of regret: When markets are chill, who needs gold? Then volatility hits, and suddenly it’s your best friend. Prices rally? “Too expensive now.” Rally more? Cue the FOMO and you’re piling in like it’s Black Friday at the mint. It’s a cycle that costs real money.

And silver? If gold is the steady uncle at family gatherings, silver is the unpredictable cousin who shows up with fireworks. Silver down 30% from highs while gold’s “only” off 10%? Your inner voice screams, “Sell everything!” We all fantasize about buying dips, yet when they happen, we freeze or bail.

Your buy and sell decisions should come from studying history and understanding money, not from refreshing your screen every five minutes. Remember the 2020–2021 bull run? Those who held through the noise made a killing. The emotional sellers? They got to watch.

Gold’s allure as a safe haven draws crowds during fear spikes, but fear-driven capital is fragile - it flees at the first sign of calm, and the bag-holders get left behind. That’s exactly what Sprott Money’s Andrew Sleigh told me recently: “the phones ring when prices rise and go silent on dips - everybody's backwards on this."

Most traders ride an emotional rollercoaster, reacting to every dip with no strategy beyond “hope.” The people who actually make money in this market buy when everyone else is terrified and hold when nothing’s happening. Nobody wants to do that. But it works.

Even at all-time highs, public enthusiasm can be hilariously low. We’re still in the early innings of this bull market, and as it charges on - and growing debt and the geopolitical mess increases - the masses will eventually jump in late. “Everyone’s a genius in a bull market” - but in precious metals, the real geniuses are the patient ones who ignore the noise.

Know thyself. Are you a FOMO chaser or a panic seller? Diversify emotionally: Mix physical holdings with miners or ETFs, but only what you can stomach. Study history - gold’s weathered empires, wars, and crashes. It’s not flashy like crypto, but it’s reliable, like that old truck that always starts.

That’s all solid advice. I believe every word of it. But I’ll be honest with you - knowing the right thing to do and actually doing it are two very different things. I know this because I’ve lived it.

Back in early 2020, I was sitting where many of you are right now. I understood the macro case for gold and silver. I could see what was coming. But every time I looked at a chart, my brain did exactly what I just spent five hundred words warning you about - it panicked at drawdowns, chased rallies, and second-guessed entries. My analysis was sound, but my execution was driven by emotion.

So I asked a question that consumed the next four years of my life: What if I could take the emotion out entirely?

Not with vague rules like “buy the dip” - we’ve all seen how that goes. I mean a proper system, built on data, that tells you when to be in and when to be out, based on decades of market data rather than whatever your adrenaline is screaming on a red day.

I called it the Theseus Project - named after the hero who used a golden thread to escape the Labyrinth after slaying the Minotaur. From 2020 to 2024, I tested literally hundreds of thousands of combinations of volume, trend and momentum strategies across over fifty years of gold and silver price history. I then used heatmaps to see what was signal and what was noise.

Every combination measured, filtered, stress-tested against the worst markets in the data. I’ve come to believe that most of what gets sold as “technical analysis” is astrology with fancier charts, and it’s impossible to objectively test their results so you just have to “trust them”. I wanted to find what really drove these wonderful and infuriating markets - the signals that held up across bull markets, bear markets, crashes, and the long boring stretches in between.

The results weren’t what I expected. Not because they were complicated - in fact the best systems tended to be simpler than I’d imagined - but because the data told a clear story about where precious metals were heading. In 2024, the system signalled a significant breakout. Not a trade. A structural shift - something that plays out over years, not weeks, and could take prices hundreds of percent higher.

Since then, I’ve been expanding the original Silver research - applying the same methodology to Gold, to mining stocks, to Bitcoin - and sharing it all with a small group of dedicated beta testers to make sure it delivers in real time, not just in backtests. I’ll let you hear about those results from the testers themselves in a future edition.

The emotional traps we talked about today - the FOMO, the panic selling, the paralysis - that’s not a weakness, it’s just being human. And the only way I’ve found to actually beat it is to take myself out of the loop. Hand the decisions to a system that doesn’t have feelings and doesn’t read Twitter.

More on this soon. Much more. Enjoy the rest of your weekend, and stay golden, Buzzers.

That’s all for this Sunday, folks! I’ll see you on Tuesday.

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

Rick Adams
Founder, GoldBuzz
rick@goldbuzz.com