Gold trounced treasuries, dollar, but biggest precious metals bull market trade may be moving

CNBC

17-06-2025

Precious metals have been on a tear this year, with gold, silver and platinum all posting returns above 20%, as the alternative asset class that has long been an investor safe haven during times of market volatility.
With gold recently hitting all-time highs, and silver reaching a price level on Tuesday that was its highest since 2011, and platinum up over 35% year-to-date, all have trounced the traditional U.S. financial system based safe-haven assets — treasuries and the U.S. dollar.
What's taking place is a combination of the safe-haven trade occurring at the same time as concerns about the U.S. deficit and the de-dollarization wave among foreign central banks amid political shifts since President Trump's election and a global realignment of interests.
Gold is up about 27% so far in 2025, "yet U.S. treasuries are kind of meandering around and it's not really providing the same safe haven experience that treasuries and the U.S. dollar traditionally played," said Sprott Asset Management CEO John Ciampaglia on a recent edition of CNBC's ETF Edge.
In some respects, gold's movement has aspects of the non-traditional, acting a little more like "digital gold" — i.e. bitcoin — with the safe-haven metal moving up alongside the cryptocurrency. If that's the case, Jan Van Eck, CEO of ETF and mutual fund company VanEck, says that gold has some catching up to do with its new rival.
"Thirty-seven million Americans own exposure to gold," he said on "ETF Edge" alongside Ciampaglia. "Guess how many own exposures to bitcoin? 50 million Americans," he said, citing the results from one recent survey. "That makes a lot of sense to me, because people look at those as a store value. And over the last couple of years a lot of the appreciation has gone into bitcoin," Van Eck said.
The S&P 500 posted two consecutive years of 25 percent-plus returns in 2023 and 2024. While the S&P is fighting to hold onto gains this year amid the sharp swings in the stock market, this is the second consecutive year gold is up 25 percent-plus.
"Last year was a real unusual year where gold went up over 25%. We're already at that mark year-to-date," Ciampaglia said.
One reason for continued momentum in the metal he cited is the fact that most of the buying in gold has been among foreign central banks diversifying away from U.S. government-linked assets that have long been safe havens. Now, Ciampaglia says, "people are starting to reallocate to gold, but it is still a very small number of the population."
Year-to-date, the two biggest gold ETFs, SPDR Gold Shares and iShares Gold Trust, have taken in over $11 billion, according to data from ETFAction.com, among the top 25 ETFs for flows, with the SPDR Gold Shares' near $7 billion in assets No. 13 overall in the ETF industry.
But he says investors should be looking as much, if not more, at silver and platinum, where thinks some of the next bigger moves may be centered among the precious metals boom. Even though platinum has posted stellar numbers this year, he called it and silver a "catch-up" trade that still has room to run, a view that was reflected in silver's trading chart on Tuesday, when it hit a level it has not seen since 2012.
"For both those metals, they are just getting out of the starting block," Ciampaglia said on the ETF Edge podcast segment. "Think about the price of silver ... it was at $50 an ounce at its all-time high in 2011, so it is a long way off the all-time high."
Silver was trading above $37 on Tuesday.
The recent divergence between the price of gold and price of silver is another reason for investors to consider the relative opportunity, according to Ciampaglia. One common metric investors use to compare the trading opportunity is the price of an ounce of gold compared to the price of an ounce of silver, which has recently been as high as 100 to 1. It's come down in recent trading but not near its long-term average of 60 to 1, he said.
That divergence will always exist, Ciampaglia said, because silver is not held by central banks to the extent of gold, and its "hybrid" use, which includes industrial applications, recently has been weighed down by the trade war and tariffs.
But silver is an important metal due to its high conductivity across many different applications in electronics, renewable energy such as solar panels, and in health care equipment, he said. Even as the U.S. solar market goes over a cliff due to changes being contemplated in tax credits in the GOP tax bill, Ciampaglia said supply and demand in the global silver market has been in a deficit over the last few years and investors are "starting to wake up" to this imbalance.
The single biggest driver of silver demand in the last few years has been the deployment of solar capacity, but even if the U.S. market pulls back, Ciampaglia said it has been China leading the way and leading to demand for silver given its conductivity benefits as a paste inside photovoltaic panels and ability to excite electrons. "We think somewhere in the neighborhood of 20% of global supply has been repurposed to fit that and China is really focused on all forms of energy," he said.
He added that in a bull market for precious metals, gold will always be the first mover when financial fears become foremost for investors, but silver can "slingshot right by it," he said, and that is scenario he thinks could play out over the rest of the year.
"Silver is the one starting to show much better strength technically, and we're starting to see shortages in market, and that can have a knock-on effect and investors finally allocate capital to the sector," he said. "We're seeing inflows to most silver ETFs and until recently that has been absent," he added.
In fact, over the past three months, the iShares Silver Trust has taken in more than $1 billion from investors, according to ETF Action data.
Platinum, Ciampaglia said, has been in a similar price dynamic to silver even with its big gains this year, "very depressed for a long time, but in the last few months it has broken out," he said.
A persistent supply deficit, similar to silver, is part of the reason for platinum to get a new look from investors, especially when the price of gold runs up so much over a multi-year period, Ciampgalia said. When the price of gold becomes very lofty, and when the market sees signs of the gold buying frenzy in markets such as China where consumers are big buyers of gold jewelry, some substitution activity begins and people start buying platinum jewelry. The structural market deficit combined with the increase in demand has been responsible for the big move up in a short period of time for platinum, Ciampaglia said.
Another trend in the global economy that supports platinum, he said, is the slowdown in EV adoption. Platinum is important for catalytic converters (so is palladium) and as the auto market dials down its pace of EV production, and the combustion engine and diesel are poised to be in the market for longer than many had forecast, there will be more demand for platinum and palladium as part of the equipment used to improve the quality of exhaust, Ciampaglia said.
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