Welcome back, GoldBuzzers.

Silver is up almost 15% in three weeks. But retail bullion buying is down roughly 50% over the same window. That gap is today's feature, drawing on my Friday night conversation with Andrew Sleigh at Sprott Money.

Let’s get into it. 👇

Gold climbed on Friday to close near $4,833, while silver surged almost 5% to $82.52 before giving back half of those gains into the close, as both metals locked in a fourth straight weekly gain. The catalyst was Iran's foreign minister declaring the Strait of Hormuz "completely open" to commercial shipping for the duration of the 10-day Israel-Lebanon ceasefire.

Oil prices cratered on the news - U.S. crude settled down 9.4% at $82.59 a barrel, its lowest level since March 10 - and Wall Street ripped to fresh all-time highs. But the fine print matters. Vessels must follow a "coordinated route" designated by Iran's maritime authorities, and President Trump made clear the U.S. naval blockade on Iranian ports stays in place until a full deal is reached. The ceasefire deadline is April 22. That gives negotiators five days to turn a fragile truce into something more permanent. Until then, the Hormuz reopening is conditional, the blockade continues, and gold and silver are pricing in the reality that this is far from settled.

That's the setup Andrew Sleigh at Sprott Money walked me through on Friday night, after the markets had closed. Andrew has been our recurring source for dealer-level intelligence in these pages, and he's called more of this market correctly than most public voices. His last read on March 26 was openly bearish: silver in the 60s was possible, maybe the 50s. That was a careful call at a careful moment.

On Friday night he gave me something different.

Sprott's Canadian business is down around 50% month over month. The phones, in Andrew's words, are "pretty quiet." The regular stackers keep adding on red days. Everyone else has disappeared.

"It's gotten quiet because this up-down channel that we're in has certainly made things quieter where people are trying to figure out, you know, do I buy now or is it still going to go down?"

That paralysis is worth sitting with. Because through this exact window of retail dormancy, silver climbed from $71 to almost $81 at Friday’s close. The crowd didn't buy the bottom. It's not buying the rally either. Waiting for a clean signal usually means missing the easy part of the move.

His summary on Friday: "I'm bullish on accumulating. I'm bearish on price."

Two things living next to each other. He still sees the choppy range continuing. He wouldn't be surprised by another downside test. But he's treating every dip as an opportunity to add to his own stack, and his mid-term to long-term view is what he called "extremely bullish."

For a dealer who's been cautious on price through this entire correction, that's a real tonal shift.

Andrew's most concrete advice on Friday night: if you want a core physical position locked in, do it now.

Part is geopolitical. The US-Iran ceasefire announced this week is holding for now. Crude dropped more than ten percent on word that the Strait of Hormuz stays open through the ten-day window. But the troop consolidation hasn't stopped, Andrew doesn't believe the diplomatic story, and the longer this drags, the more strained energy supply and global logistics become.

Part is boring preparedness. If you need tires, a water heater, or a car battery any time in the next year, Andrew's view is buy them now. His educated guess is that goods prices could be running 50% higher by late summer if energy markets seize up. He's not forecasting that as certain, but the logic is clear. Higher oil prices will mean higher everything prices.

Quick primer for anyone new to this.

A stablecoin is a digital token pegged one-to-one to a fiat currency, backed by reserves of cash or short-term treasuries, redeemable at face value. USDC and USDT are the large ones in circulation globally, issued by private companies under government supervision. A central bank digital currency, or CBDC, is the same basic idea but issued directly by the central bank itself, fully programmable, and visible to the issuer by design. Digital identity is the access layer that sits underneath both. The system that decides who can hold what, send what, and spend what, usually tied to biometrics.

The direction of travel is no longer theoretical. Canada just passed Bill C-15 on March 26, establishing its first federal stablecoin framework under Bank of Canada supervision, with Deloitte and Stablecorp already announcing a QCAD digital dollar.

The US passed the GENIUS Act in July 2025. Similar frameworks are live across the EU, UK, and major Asian economies. Mexico has committed to a digital peso by year-end. A coordinated global shift in how money works, with different timelines but the same direction.

Worth noting: the GENIUS Act legally requires stablecoin issuers to maintain the technical capability to freeze, seize, or burn tokens on government orders, and to comply with those orders when received. That's not speculation. That's how the architecture is being built!

Physical metal in your possession sits outside all of it. No issuer, no custodian, no access layer. Nothing to freeze, delay, or seize.

If oil climbs on any re-escalation, mining costs climb with it. Oil is by far the largest single input cost across gold and silver mining operations. At $4,800 gold and $80 silver, the producers are printing money. With oil at $130 and sulphuric acid short-supplied because of refinery disruption, those margins tighten quickly. Worth watching for anyone holding the majors or the juniors.

Every long bull market has consolidations that look something like this. Retail engagement dies off while prices chop sideways. The regulars keep accumulating on weak sessions. By the time the move resumes and the crowd notices, a lot of the easy gains are already done.

Silver at $80 is still well below January's print. The gold-silver ratio at 60 has compressed from its recent extremes, but silver still has meaningful catch-up room. Sprott's phones going quiet while spot climbs ten dollars is textbook mid-cycle behaviour.

Andrew was direct on Friday night: pick the physical number you'd want to own through the next few months, and don't let the news cycle decide that number for you. The coming weeks are going to contain a lot of noise.

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

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Rick Adams
Founder, GoldBuzz
rick@goldbuzz.com