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Object of the Week

Why Silver Isn’t a Stonk

The meme investor mob came after a physical commodity, and it didn’t go well

Rob Walker
Marker
Published in
5 min readFeb 4, 2021

Object of the Week is a new column exploring the objects a culture obsesses over and what that reveals about us.

Over the past week or so, the meme-crazed, Reddit-fueled “stonk market” phenomenon careened in a new direction. Instead of aiming to drive up the share price of yet another business with a dubious financial future, the mob went after silver. This hasn’t worked out — largely because of the nature of silver itself as a physical commodity whose value can be difficult to untether from its materiality.

The run on silver seems to have been sparked by users of Reddit’s now-infamous WallStreetBets group, calling for a short squeeze — running up the price on silver and forcing short interests to cash in their silver futures positions at a punishing loss. This “ignited a buying frenzy that roiled precious-metals markets and squeezed physical supplies,” says one report, causing the U.S. Mint to ration sales of silver coins. “We have seen unprecedented demand for physical silver,” one dealer commented. Shares of mining companies went up, and futures prices did spike, reaching an eight-year high on Monday.

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Marker
Marker

Published in Marker

Marker was a publication from Medium about the intersection of business, economics, and culture. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Rob Walker
Rob Walker

Written by Rob Walker

Author The Art of Noticing. Related newsletter at https://robwalker.substack.com

Responses (8)

„The Mob“ didn‘t go after silver.
If you had just spent 5 minutes reading on wsb you would have seen a massive amount of people warning over the „distraction“ to buy silver, for all the reason mentioned in the article.
redditers were also not behind…

149

I have to second Ms Cobalt, you did not do your due diligence on the matter, redditers did not go after silver, but do not worry, you are in good company, most major news sources got this wrong, what kind of seriously shocked me

68

It is really pity that people are writing such articles which are so far from truth. Seems that the only source of information is other media. Amateuristic.

64