Happy Sunday, GoldBuzzers!

Friday was a sell everything day. Stocks, oil, Bitcoin, gold and silver all went down together, with no safe corner to hide in. For the previous week, all four of our INSIDER Minimum Risk signals (Gold, Silver, Gold Miners and Silver Miners) had been showing bearish readings, so the crash wasn’t a surprise.

That alignment from all four precious metals signals doesn’t happen often, so I spent the weekend working back through 16 years of data to see what this setup has meant before. I also caught up with Andrew Sleigh at Sprott Money to find out what Friday actually looked like from behind the counter, and what he told me was not what I expected.

Ok. Let’s get into it. ⬇️

Gold and silver both took a beating on Friday, with gold sliding to around $4,330 and silver crashing below $68 to mark their lowest closing levels of 2026. The catalyst was a blockbuster May jobs report that blew past expectations, showing 172,000 new positions added versus a consensus forecast of just 80,000, while unemployment held at 4.3 percent and wage growth came in at 3.4 percent year-over-year.

The numbers handed rate hawks exactly what they needed, and bond traders wasted no time pricing in a full quarter-point Fed rate hike by December, with roughly a 60 percent chance the move comes as early as October. For gold, that translated into a weekly loss of almost five percent. Silver had it worse, shedding almost ten percent on the week as its industrial demand profile left it more exposed to the shifting rate outlook.

Adding to the pressure, Middle East uncertainty continued to simmer, with Hezbollah rejecting a US-brokered ceasefire in Lebanon even as President Trump insisted progress was being made. The combination of a resilient labor market and unresolved geopolitical risk has created a tug-of-war that, for now at least, the dollar and rate expectations are winning.

Friday was a deeply unpleasant day for many precious metals investors, but on Saturday afternoon I received a long email from an INSIDER subscriber that made my day.

He has given me permission to mention his story but asked me not to use his name, so I’m going to call him Bob, and I can tell you that Bob has the distinction of being the first INSIDER subscriber from Denmark!

Bob told me he has been a long-time stacker and investor who has experienced some brutal drawdowns, largely by following the advice of two very well-known precious metals experts. When silver was over $100 earlier this year, both told their subscribers it was likely to reach as high as $500 by this summer, and Bob bought a lot more silver at triple-digit prices.

When he joined INSIDER, Bob said he spent the first weekend reading through all the documentation to understand how the system works, and decided he would use the Min Risk indicator for every purchase going forward.

INSIDER has two indicators for every market. The Max Return indicator earns the larger returns over the long run, but pays for them with more exposure and deeper drawdowns along the way. The other is called Min Risk, and it has one job: keeping you out of the worst declines.

It steps aside early, and it gives up some upside in exchange for not riding a market down. Over the past three months, each of our Min Risk signals for the precious metals (gold, silver, gold miners and silver miners) turned bearish, one by one. The gold and silver miners went first in early March, silver in mid-May, and gold last of all, a week ago. That was the first time since October 2023 that all four were in cash at once, and it marked an environment of heightened risk.

When the silver Min Risk signal turned bearish in mid-May, Bob bought a large number of SLV put options at strike prices around $77. When gold turned a week later and all four signals were finally bearish together, he treated that alignment as significant, bought more SLV puts, and added GLD puts.

On Friday afternoon, with silver down just over 8 percent on the day, Bob cashed out of all of them.

He is delighted, as you would imagine, and made a substantial profit. He has paid for his subscription hundreds of times over, and he tells me he plans to put the gains toward another 500 ounces of silver and 10 ounces of gold, and may buy fresh puts next week to hedge against more downside until the Min Risk signals turn bullish again.

Congratulations to Bob. Options are a specialised instrument and they’re not for everyone, so this is not me suggesting anyone rush out and buy them. The part of his story that matters is not the instrument. It is that Bob did not try to predict anything. He set his plan in advance systematically and let the signals, not his nerves, tell him when to act.

What Bob had spotted does not happen often, which makes it worth asking a plain question. When all four signals have turned together before, what came next?

The good news is that most of the time it has meant nothing, and a few times it has meant the start of a bear that cut the miners in half or worse.

I went back through every trading day since 2010 and found 26 separate episodes. The answer splits cleanly, and not the way most people fear. Most of the time, nothing much happens. Twenty-three of the 26 lasted about two weeks and did little damage. The complex wobbled and went down about 3-5%, the signals flipped back, and the trend resumed. Anyone who sold in a panic each time spent most of those exits buying back higher.

The bad news is that three times, it was the start of an even deeper correction. Those episodes did not last two weeks. They ran anywhere from about a year to nearly three. An equal-weight basket of gold, silver, gold miners and silver miners lost between 15 and 58 percent from peak to trough. In the 2012 to 2015 bear, the miners fell 70 percent.

Buy and Hold investors would have held through these extended drawdowns while the INSIDER signals were all bearish.

Here is the part that should give you pause. I looked at how each of those three bears began. Not how they ended, but their opening days. In their first four sessions, the worst declines in the record moved minus 0.6 percent, plus 0.1 percent, and minus 0.7 percent. Quieter than half the harmless episodes. The drops that erased the better part of a decade of mining gains did not arrive with a crash. They drifted in, indistinguishable from noise (the bears arrived quietly).

That is the entire argument for following a system instead of your instinct. Not because the signal predicts a bear. It usually does not, and most of these episodes come to nothing. It is because you cannot tell, in the first week, whether you are looking at a two-week dip or the front edge of a multi-year grind. Stepping aside from all of them is the cost of being out of the three that would have taken half your capital in the miners.

So that’s what the signals were saying. On Friday night after the markets had closed, I finally had a chance to catch up with Andrew Sleigh, senior broker at Sprott Money. With silver still bleeding, I wanted to ask him what his desk had done that day.

I expected panic. He described the opposite. He had written over half a million dollars in sales on Friday by market close. It was order after order from existing clients buying the drop, sizes running from $25,000 up to $100,000, with roughly $200,000 of the day in gold and the rest in silver. As he put it, nobody was calling from a window ledge - they were calling to buy!

That’s the split a day like Friday exposes. The crowd freezes. The buyers who have sat through a cycle before treat the drop as a discount, and they do it without trying to pick the exact low, because they know they cannot. Andrew would not put a forecast on it, though he said it would not surprise him to see silver tap the $60 area in the weeks ahead, down from the high $80s as recently as mid-May. He is not calling a bottom, just nibbling toward one.

One more thing is worth passing on, because it’s new. Alongside the buying, Andrew has been fielding a steady run of people moving metal to him for storage, pulling it out of bank safety deposit boxes and other vaults, with more interest than he has heard in a long time.

More clients are also calling to ask what they actually own inside their physical metal ETFs, and whether a paper claim is the same thing as bars behind a locked door. None of that is fear. It is money moving, quietly, toward something tangible you can hold.

So while Friday was a bloodbath for some, Andrew’s clients were quietly accumulating and INSIDER subscriber Bob was cashing in his Options to buy more physical later.

When the last of the four Min Risk signals turned bearish a week ago, prices wobbled a little but things looked relatively harmless. After Friday, less so. I don’t know yet know which of the two this correction becomes, and neither does anyone else, including the man watching the orders come across his desk. What I do know is what the record says when the whole complex turns bearish, and what the playbook says to do about it. We follow it.

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

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Rick Adams
Founder, GoldBuzz
rick@goldbuzz.com