Happy Sunday, GoldBuzzers!

Six months into this correction, everyone wants to know where the bottom is. On Friday night I spoke with someone who can see actual buy orders waiting to be placed, and he gave me a number. It's closer than you might expect.

Let’s get into it. ⬇️

Gold closed the week at $4,010 an ounce, down more than 3 percent, while silver finished near $56 after touching $54.77, its lowest since late November 2025 and a weekly loss of more than 6 percent.

The pressure came from two directions. Escalating conflict in the Middle East pushed oil higher after Tehran struck US facilities following a sixth straight night of US attacks on Iranian military targets, with traffic through the Strait of Hormuz still disrupted, and President Trump warned that US strikes could extend to Iranian infrastructure next week without a diplomatic breakthrough.

Higher oil means stickier inflation, and the Fed leaned into it. Dallas Fed President Lorie Logan called for modestly higher interest rates, the most specific hike call of this cycle, while Vice Chair Philip Jefferson said the Fed should consider raising rates if inflation doesn’t cool soon.

Futures markets now put the odds of a hike by the September meeting over 70 percent, even after June consumer and producer prices both declined on lower energy costs while import prices unexpectedly rose. For now, rate expectations rather than the missiles are doing the damage to the metals.

I got back on the phone with Andrew Sleigh, my senior contact at Sprott Money, on Friday night. If you're new here, Andrew runs one of the largest dealer desks in North America, and that gives us something the charts can't: a live read on what physical buyers and sellers are actually doing. We've been comparing notes since January, through the top, the crash, and the subsequent grinding correction.

Friday was a fitting backdrop. Silver closed at $55.91, an eight-month low, down 6.6 percent on the week and 52 percent from its January 28 closing peak of $116.58. Oil is up roughly 13 percent in five days as strikes continue in the Middle East, and markets have moved from pricing rate cuts to pricing possible hikes.

Andrew doesn't expect that pressure to lift quickly. "I think we've got a few more weeks at least on this," he told me, adding that the crisis could last far longer than anyone expects.

Here's what particularly caught my attention. The quiet phones don't mean the buyers are gone.

"I've got half a dozen to a dozen clients sitting on the sidelines with money that they want to pour in," Andrew said. "They're just waiting till we get a little bit lower."

Lower means $54. That's the line his waiting money is watching, and it sits just 3.4 percent below Friday's close. His rule is mechanical: two consecutive closes below $54 confirms the break, and the next stop becomes $48 to $50. He isn't trying to catch the exact bottom.

"I'm waiting on 54. However many down days I need to get to 54, that'll satisfy me." He's in the same queue himself, with his own cash ready. "There's so much money sitting on the sideline. We're hoping this thing gets over with so the money starts pouring in."

Why $54, and why $48 to $50 below it? Pull the chart back 45 years and the answer is sitting there. Silver's two great peaks, January 1980 at $49.45 and April 2011 at $48.41, form the rim of a four-decade cup. Silver finally broke through that rim last October and ran to $116. What's happening now is the retest of that breakout. Andrew put it in dealer language: markets tend to return to the scene of the crime. His buy zone is the rim itself.

Coins are plentiful, though bars remain in short supply from the mints. Premiums are soft and drifting lower. Buyback offers now sit three to four percent below spot on coins and as much as eight percent below on bars, where dealers would pay near spot in a normal market. "Business is slow at every level," Andrew said. "The street, stores, us, whoever."

That spread carries an honest lesson for stackers. Between the premium you pay on the way in and the discount you accept on the way out, physical silver currently needs roughly a ten percent price improvement before a round trip breaks even, with gold a couple of points less. Physical is insurance and conviction, not a trading vehicle, and weak markets are when that distinction costs the most.

One more thing from the desk. Andrew says more people are moving metal out of bank safety deposit boxes than he has ever seen in his career, and he points out that most box agreements state the bank is not responsible for the contents. If you have your own safety deposit box, it’s worth doing your own due diligence to see if it’s still the best option.

For GoldBuzz INSIDER members, the signals tell the same story from the other side. Gold's Min Risk signal has been bearish since early June, and the miners' Min Risk signals have been bearish since early March, which kept members out of a brutal 30% drawdown in the mining indexes over that stretch. Silver's signal flipped briefly bullish, then bearish again last week. The silver price now sits only 2.2 percent under the current flip point, close enough that a strong start to the week could turn the signals bullish again.

Remember that a 6-month correction is perfectly normal in a bull market, and as painful as it’s been, we have been building a powerful base for the next leg up.

Andrew and I plan to speak again in late August. Between now and then, the market gets to answer the only question that matters here: does $54 silver hold, or does the waiting money finally hit its target.

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

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Rick Adams
Founder, GoldBuzz
rick@goldbuzz.com