Gold & Silver Afternoon Update 12/17/2025 | The Bregar Minute
An incredibly volatile and confusing last 24hrs for the precious metals, and it all started with Trump’s threatening Truth Social post against Venezuela during the 6pmET hour last night. This quickly lifted gold back above its 55hr moving average, nullifying the negative momentum from yesterday afternoon. Platinum & palladium then exploded higher at the China open (for the third night in a row), silver vaulted +3% in an hour as a result and the white metal move even drove gold higher despite the oil market’s consolidation. What was even more surreal, the precious metal rally continued for all of Asian trade despite strong USD buying following another big pushback against Chinese yuan strength from the PBOC.
With Europe then hitting gold & bonds, and bidding stock futures back up (essentially fading the Venezuela wars fears), you got a sense that we’d see continuations of these moves into early NY trade today, but we suddenly got the exact opposite when the Fed’s Waller dropped some dovish commentary during the 8amET. While the ensuing US yield & USD weakness into the London close made sense, the inability for the S&Ps to rally further didn’t…and we then saw a very volatile 9:30-11amET period as the metals didn’t know whether to follow the falling dollar or the falling stock market.
Palladium then viciously squeezed higher for no particular reason during the 11amET hour, igniting the next leg of the silver rally and rescuing gold…despite continued S&P weakness and some upside consolidation for the dollar and bond yields. Finally, we saw a bit of the Venezuela fear trade re-emerge into the close (buy gold, USD, bonds, oil and sell stocks) following Tucker Carlson’s comment that Trump will announce war with Venezuela in his scheduled 9pmET speech tonight. Silver and the PGMs continue to ignore this week’s sharp deterioration in risk sentiment…this is both exciting and scary at the same time because this feels like a new paradigm that nobody has a model for. Yes, the “Asian white metal hoarding / shortage of Western exchange inventory narrative” makes for a very compelling trade, but to what end does the average investor chase this rally with no real-time visibility into these flows? VAR shocks also have a weird way of creeping up behind us when we least expect (ie. Liberation Day tariffs), and so I have a hard time believing that silver, platinum and palladium (traditionally very risk-sensitive metals) are suddenly immune.
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