Any time a big bank puts out a gold forecast, the first question I get from silver stackers is what it means for silver. It makes sense. We’ve all heard that silver follows gold, so if gold is headed lower, silver should be too, probably by more. This month that question got a lot of attention. Neils Christensen over at Kitco wrote up Bank of America’s latest gold outlook, which says gold probably hasn’t hit its bottom yet, and a day later he covered a note from Mike McGlone at Bloomberg Intelligence saying silver could drop back to $50. Put those two side by side and they look like one story, with gold falling, silver falling harder, and $50 as the landing spot. But when you actually read them, BofA was only talking about gold, McGlone was only talking about silver, and their reasons had almost nothing in common. So I wanted to answer that question I keep getting, which is how much a gold forecast should really tell us about silver, and I went back to the charts to see how silver has actually behaved next to gold.
What Bank of America actually said
BofA’s call was about gold and only gold. They expect it to average around $4,000 for the rest of the year, with a possible dip to $3,750. What didn’t make most of the headlines is that they still have gold averaging $4,813 in 2027, so this is a short-term pullback call from a bank that’s still pretty bullish in the long run. Their reasoning is that buying from China, India and central banks has cooled off, and central banks led by Turkey actually sold around 60 tonnes in the second quarter. They think gold needs either a friendlier Fed or a fresh round of worries about the dollar losing value before it turns back up. I have my doubts about parts of that, but either way, there’s no silver forecast in there anywhere. Any silver number you get out of this report is one you’d have to work out yourself.
McGlone’s $50 has nothing to do with gold
McGlone’s note is actually about silver, and his argument isn’t that gold drags it down. He’s looking at how overheated silver got on its own. Over the past year silver has been swinging about five times harder than the stock market, which is more than any time since 1980, and at the end of 2025 it was trading at almost three times its average price over the previous ten years, the biggest stretch since 1979. He sees $50 as the first level where buyers should really step in, and he thinks silver could bounce around between $50 and $84 for years. He’d want to see it get back over $84 and stay there before he changes his mind. For context, silver was sitting around $59 when his note came out, after hitting an all-time high north of $120 at the start of the year.
He also points out that after the 1980 and 2011 tops, silver didn’t find its bottom until 1993 and 2020. That’s going to scare some people, but look at how long those took, thirteen years in one case and nine in the other. I read that as a point about how long a silver hangover can drag on, not as a call that we’re headed there next quarter.
Lining them up on the chart
Everybody’s heard that silver follows gold, but I wanted to actually see it. I built a free tool on Stack Heavy for exactly this called the Metals Performance Index. You pick a start date and it sets every metal to 100 on that day, so if gold reads 120 later on it’s up 20%, and if silver reads 80 it’s down 20%. It’s the easiest way I’ve found to compare two metals that trade at completely different prices. I started with the run we all just went through, with both metals set to 100 on June 1, 2025.
From that starting point silver ran up to roughly 350 on the chart, which is about a 250% gain at the top, while gold peaked somewhere around 165. Silver definitely followed gold up, it just went a whole lot further, and then it gave a whole lot more of it back. As I’m writing this silver sits at 177.9 and gold is at 125.9. Silver is still ahead of where it was in June of last year, but look at how much of the gain is gone compared to gold. To make it even clearer, I reset the chart to January 29, 2026, right around silver’s peak.
Since late January, gold is down 23.9% and silver is down 49.5%. Same direction, about twice the damage. That’s pretty much the whole “silver follows gold” idea in two numbers. Silver tends to go where gold goes, and it tends to get there harder, whether it’s headed up or down.
Except when it doesn’t
That holds up most of the time, but not every time, and 2011 is a great example. Silver topped out near $49 at the end of April that year, while gold kept climbing for another four months and didn’t peak until early September. I set the chart to that exact window, April 28 to September 6, 2011.
Silver lost about a third of its value in the first two weeks of May while gold barely flinched. By the end of that window gold was up 23.4% and silver was down 14.1%. That’s a 37 point gap between two metals that supposedly move together, in the same market, reacting to the same news. Silver has its own stuff going on, like industrial demand, its own supply issues, and a much smaller market that gets pushed around a lot easier than gold does, and every so often that stuff wins out. That’s the main reason I’m not a fan of taking somebody’s gold forecast and just multiplying it out to come up with a silver price.
More volatile doesn’t mean better
This next one honestly surprised me, and I think it’s going to surprise a lot of you too. The price history on Stack Heavy goes all the way back to January 1970, so I set the start date there to see who has really come out ahead over the long haul.
Since 1970 gold is up about 116 times and silver is up about 33 times. You can see all of silver’s big moments in there, 1980, 2011 and this year, and every time it shot up harder than gold and then gave it back. Over the full 56 years gold won by a mile. But when I moved the start date to October 15, 2021, I got a completely different answer.
Over the last five years silver actually beat gold, 253.9 to 234.3. Officially, inflation was up about 21% over that same stretch. If you’ve bought groceries, renewed your car insurance or looked at a house lately, you probably have your own opinion about that number, and I’d guess it’s a lot higher than 21%. Either way, both metals beat it by a mile. Same tool, same data, but start in 1970 and gold crushes silver, start in 2021 and silver comes out on top. Anybody can find a start date that makes their favorite metal look like the winner, so when you see a chart like this from me or anyone else, check the dates before you look at the lines. That’s why I’ve told you the start date for every chart in this post.
Where I land
I don’t know where silver is going over the next three months, and Bank of America doesn’t either. McGlone makes a solid case, but it’s based on reading the charts, and silver has a habit of ignoring those. What I’m comfortable saying is that a gold forecast is useful background for silver, but it isn’t a silver forecast. Silver usually goes where gold goes with the volume turned way up, sometimes it goes its own way entirely, and the same swings that make it so much fun on the way up are what cut it in half this year.
If you stack silver, and most of you reading this do, I think the honest takeaway is to expect drops like the one we’re in now. It’s happened before and it’ll happen again, so stack in a way where a 50% drop is something you can sit through and not something that forces your hand. And don’t just go by my screenshots. Go play with the Metals Performance Index yourself, try different start dates, turn on platinum and palladium, and see what you find. It’s free and it’s going to stay that way.
Sources: Kitco News articles by Neils Christensen, “Gold price needs a dovish Fed or renewed debasement fears to reverse its downtrend” (October 12, 2026), “Risks rising that gold prices fall below $4,000 in Q4, Bank of America” (October 1, 2026), and “Silver prices could be headed back to $50, Bloomberg’s McGlone” (October 13, 2026). Chart data from the Stack Heavy Metals Performance Index.
These are my personal opinions and observations, not financial advice. Always do your own research before making investment decisions.