Based on the August 15th, 2013 Premium Update. Visit our archives for more gold articles.

In our previous essay we focused on silver’s relationship with the general stock market. Today, we think it would be interesting to revisit the silver-to-gold ratio. However, before we do that, let's check the recent price action in silver and gold.

Yesterday, silver posted biggest six-day gains in 2 years. Today, in pre-market trading, the white metal climbed up once again and reached the highest level in a month as holdings in the world's largest silver-backed exchange-traded fund, the iShares Silver Trust (SLV ETF), rose to a four-month high.

According to Reuters, gold extended gains on Thursday to a three-week high on hopes the Federal Reserve may not scale back its commodities-friendly bond buying soon, and as holdings at the world's top gold-backed exchange traded fund (GLD ETF) rose for a second time in a week.

U.S. producer prices were flat in July, which could add to worries at the Federal Reserve that inflation is running too low, indicating the U.S. central bank might not end its stimulus until inflation (taking the official numbers into account) begins to trend higher.

What impact have the above had on the silver-to-gold ratio and, in consequence, on metals themselves? Let's take a closer look at the chart below to see how both precious metals are valued relative to each other. Perhaps this will provide some clues on future moves in them (courtesy http://stockcharts.com).

Silver’s outperformance might be something that you are already, correctly, wondering about. On one hand, it seems that silver can lead gold higher. On the other hand, the last few times that silver outperformed gold were right before sizable declines. When in doubt, it’s usually best to get back to the basics, and simply check what usually happened in situations similar to the one that we have right now.

The rally in the silver-to-gold ratio was significant enough to cause the RSI indicator based on it to rally substantially, moving above the 70 level. This meaningful sign could have some implications... but it doesn’t. We checked each case in the past 5 years when the RSI moved close to or above 70, and gold rallied in about half of cases and it declined in the other half. Consequently, there’s not much that we can infer based on silver’s recent outperformance.

We usually don’t bother you with things that are not meaningful, but this time we are making an exception. This is because it seems that there will be a lot of comments on silver’s current outperformance, and we want you to be able to compare them with what we wrote above.

There is one thing about the silver-to-gold chart that is indeed meaningful, and that’s the comparison of the situation that we have now with what we saw in September 2008 right before the final plunge. Back then, the silver-to-gold ratio moved higher during the corrective upswing (before the decline continued) and the size of the rally was quite similar to what we have seen recently. Consequently, the very recent strength in the white metal does not invalidate the similarity between now and 2008, but rather confirms it.

This means that we shouldn’t say that silver’s strength is really a sign of a bottom. In fact, the long-term resistance line hasn’t been broken, and the trend remains down.

Summing up, the recent move in silver looks promising. However, we saw similar action during the only decline that is similar to the current one – and this action was right before the final, huge plunge. Silver is acting particularly strong, but it turns out that its performance relative to gold is also in tune with what happened in September 2008. Consequently, silver’s outperformance does not indicate higher precious metals prices – at least not yet.

The current action in the silver-gold ratio suggests that rather sooner than later, something's going to change in the current trend. Either silver plunges once again taking other metals with it, or we will see a true breakout. Either way, it seems that the coming price moves are going to be volatile. We encourage you to sign up for our Premium Updates and Market Alerts - staying updated on a daily basis could be particularly useful in the coming days and weeks.

Thank you for reading. Have a great weekend and profitable week!

Sincerely,
Przemyslaw Radomski, CFA