Silver’s Revenge: The Quiet Supply Crisis That Could Send the Metal Into a Generational Breakout

Note From the President and Founder, Brian Hicks:

Every year, right about this time, something wild happens around here.

Our inbox fills up.

Old subscribers resurface.

New readers pile in.

And everyone is asking the same thing: “When is the predictions podcast coming out?”

Over the years, this annual event has quietly turned into something of a cult ritual. Not because we’re flashy… but because our calls have had an uncanny habit of coming true.

We were early on gold’s last big move — and we stuck our necks out again before this latest breakout in gold and silver. We were pounding the table on precious metals while Wall Street was still half-asleep.

We’ve highlighted the “Conjoined Twins” of this new era — the AI and infrastructure boom on one side, and the commodity and hard-asset boom on the other — long before it became fashionable to talk about it on CNBC.

We called the quiet accumulation in gold and silver years ago…

We alerted you about the coming renaissance in America’s mining sector…

We spotlighted crypto and tokenization of real-world assets before the last two major runs…

And we didn’t just talk in vague generalities. We named names.

• Northern Dynasty when almost no one wanted to touch it
  
• Silvercorp Metals when silver was still treated like a sideshow
  
• A slate of “forgotten” resource and infrastructure plays that are now dead center in the MoneyQuake I’ve been writing about 

Both Northern Dynasty and Silvercorp Metals are up 290% and 190% this year, respectively.

This year’s predictions podcast is, in my view, the most important and shocking yet.

Our gold and silver price targets are jaw-dropping. And that means massive profits in the junior mining stocks we recommend.

Because 2026 isn’t just “another year” on the calendar. It’s the next major leg of a once-in-a-generation realignment in money, markets, and hard assets — the kind of environment where a single correctly timed move can compress 5–10 years of gains into a fraction of that time.

In the days ahead, you’ll see this podcast mentioned throughout our editorials. Consider those notes your invitation to join us as we walk through where we think the Dow, the S&P, the Nasdaq, gold, silver, crypto, and select “MoneyQuake” stocks are headed in 2026 — and why.

If you’ve been with me for a while, you know…

We don’t make timid predictions.

We make testable ones.

And this year, we’re swinging for the fences again.

Without further ado, welcome to Angel Investment Research’s annual predictions podcast.

Now, on to your regularly scheduled Wealth Daily…

Dear Reader,

Silver is the one asset investors love to ignore right up until the moment it goes vertical. It’s like that quiet kid in school who barely says a word all year and then crushes the final exam and leaves everyone stunned.

That’s where silver sits today…

Gold gets the headlines. Copper gets the industrial fanfare. Lithium gets the political drama.

But silver — humble, indispensable, perpetually underestimated silver — is quietly tightening into one of the most explosive supply-demand setups I’ve seen in years.

This is not your grandfather’s silver market. This is not a “maybe someday” story, either…

This is a perfect storm of industrial demand, structural underinvestment, falling mine supply, and monetary upheaval converging all at once.

And the smartest investors are already positioning. Because when silver moves, it doesn’t rise — it erupts!

The Industrial Engine Nobody Is Pricing In

For most of history, silver was treated as a monetary metal first and a commodity second.

Today, that’s flipped and silver has become one of the most crucial industrial materials of the modern age.

The demand is relentless…

Solar panels are the obvious headline — and rightfully so. Every new gigawatt of solar capacity requires a tidal wave of silver.

Nations racing toward energy independence are essentially racing toward silver consumption. And despite what you might think, the solar boom isn’t slowing; it’s accelerating.

But the real kicker — the part most investors haven’t internalized — is that silver demand is rising in every major technology sector.

AI hardware and data centers. Electric vehicles and charging systems. 5G telecommunications. Semiconductors. Medical devices. Advanced sensors. Defense systems. Consumer electronics…

Silver is the metal that makes electrons behave. You simply can’t build the future without it.

As the global economy becomes more electrified, digitized, miniaturized, and interconnected, silver consumption doesn’t just grow — it multiplies.

And unlike many industrial metals, silver has almost no substitutes at its level of conductivity.

That means you can’t “engineer your way out” of needing silver. It’s the gold medalist of electron flow, and there’s no silver medalist close behind.

The Supply Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

If silver demand were soaring while mine supply held steady, that would be bullish. But that isn’t what’s happening…

Mine supply is falling. Grades are declining…

Investment in new silver projects is minimal at best.

And most of the silver we do produce is a byproduct from other industries like lead, zinc, and copper.

That’s the danger — and the opportunity.

Silver supply isn’t driven by silver demand. It’s driven by whatever the copper and zinc markets are doing.

If those metals face slowdowns, silver supply tightens even more — even if silver prices go up.

It’s a structural mismatch baked so deeply into the market that no amount of wishful thinking can fix it.

We’ve had three straight years of global silver deficits, and the Silver Institute expects that trend to continue.

Meanwhile, new primary silver mines? You can count them on one hand, and none of them are enough to close the gap.

If an industry is running deficits while demand is rising, and supply is stagnating, and investment is nonexistent…

Well… you don’t need a Ph.D. in economics to see where that movie ends.

But in case you need a hint: It ends with much, much higher prices.

The Monetary Wild Card That Could Light the Fuse

But let’s talk about the elephant in the vault: gold.

Central banks are hoarding gold at the highest rate in modern history.

Nations are reducing dollar exposure.

Currencies everywhere are flashing stress signals.

And geopolitical tensions are driving a long-term rotation back toward hard assets.

When gold runs, silver follows — but silver always outruns gold in the final leg of a bull cycle.

Always. Every time.

The gold-to-silver ratio — the number of ounces of silver it takes to equal one ounce of gold — remains historically stretched.

When that ratio contracts, silver tends to make explosive multi-year moves.

And in a world where inflation remains sticky, interest rates are volatile, and global trade flows are fragmenting, silver’s dual identity as both an industrial and monetary metal becomes its ultimate superpower.

It participates in the inflation trade. It participates in the growth trade. It participates in the commodity trade. And it participates in the defensive hard-asset trade.

Not many assets can do that.

The Investment Setup I Love Most: The Miners

Silver the metal is great. Silver miners, though? That’s where things get wild.

Miners offer leverage…

When silver goes up 20%, miners can go up 100%. When silver doubles, miners can triple or quadruple.

And right now silver miners are the most hated, abandoned, and undervalued corner of the entire precious metals universe.

Nobody wants them. Nobody is paying attention. Nobody is pricing in a breakout.

And that’s exactly how generational trades begin…

You’ve got companies trading at levels that imply silver is dead money forever.

Meanwhile, their balance sheets are improving, their operational risk is declining, and many of them are sitting on enormous optionality that becomes instantly valuable the moment silver breaks above long-term resistance.

I’ve watched enough cycles to know this pattern by heart…

The miners bottom first, quietly. Then silver creeps higher, slowly. Then silver breaks a key technical level. Then the miners explode upward in a wave of panic buying.

Then the public wakes up and rushes into ETFs.

We’re in the very early chapters of that script.

Why This Time Is Different — No, Really

Every bubble, every hype cycle, every commodity boom comes with people claiming it’s “different this time.”

Most of the time, it isn’t.

But silver today is different — structurally, fundamentally, and mathematically — for one reason above all…

The industrial economy now needs silver more than ever, and supply cannot keep up.

This isn’t a monetary bubble. It’s not a speculative mania. It’s not an inflation tantrum. And it’s certainly not a short squeeze fantasy from Reddit…

It’s the basic physics and chemistry of a world that is electrifying faster than miners can pull silver out of the ground.

No amount of investor sentiment can change conductivity.

No amount of political nonsense can change geological depletion.

And no amount of wishful thinking can conjure new silver mines.

This is the kind of setup you only get once every few decades — when fundamentals align so perfectly that the only thing missing is time.

The Bottom Line

Silver is the underdog metal — always underestimated, always overlooked, always lagging until the moment it takes the lead. Always has been…

But right now it has more tailwinds than at any point in the last 40 years.

A supply deficit… a demand surge… a monetary wild card…

A geopolitical backdrop tailor-made for hard assets… and miners priced like silver is going out of business.

Nothing about this market is normal. And that’s what makes it so compelling.

Silver is waking up. The market hasn’t noticed yet. But when it does, the move will be legendary.

Gold is the anchor of the precious metals world, but silver is the cannon. And it’s pointed straight up.