New York, January 8, 2026, 06:17 EST — Premarket
- SLV was indicated down about 2.9% in premarket trade after a 3.7% drop at Wednesday’s close
- Spot silver fell about 3% as traders braced for index-linked metals flows and key U.S. data
- Investors are watching Friday’s U.S. payrolls report for clues on rates and the dollar
Shares of iShares Silver Trust (SLV), an exchange-traded fund (ETF) that holds physical silver and trades like a stock, fell 2.9% to $68.90 in premarket trade. The fund closed down 3.7% at $70.96 on Wednesday and was testing a break below the prior session’s $69.22 low, with the $73.84 52-week high back in view as a near-term ceiling. 1
The timing is awkward for silver bulls. The market is heading into a U.S. jobs report that can shift interest-rate bets in a hurry, and silver tends to react hard when the dollar and bond yields move.
Goldman Sachs analysts Lina Thomas and Daan Struyven said the turmoil is being driven less by a true global shortage than by where the bars sit. “Thinner inventories have created conditions for squeezes,” they wrote, pointing to unusually low London stocks after metal was pulled into U.S. vaults last year. 2
Spot silver — the cash price for immediate delivery — fell 3.1% to $75.73 an ounce, with gold also easing, as traders positioned for the Bloomberg Commodity Index annual rebalance, Reuters data showed. The rebalance runs Jan. 9-15 and could trigger $6 billion to $7 billion of selling in COMEX futures — the U.S. metals futures market — in each metal, said Ole Hansen, head of commodity strategy at Saxo Bank. HSBC expects silver to trade between $58 and $88 this year but warned the rally could be ripe for a correction after the metal hit a record $83.62 on Dec. 29. 3
Friday’s payrolls report has extra weight after fresh signs of easing demand for labor. U.S. job openings fell 303,000 to 7.146 million by the end of November, and economists polled by Reuters forecast payrolls rose about 60,000 in December with the unemployment rate easing to 4.5%. 4
The iShares trust held 16,099.83 tonnes of silver — about 517.6 million ounces — as of Jan. 7, with 570.95 million shares outstanding, its website showed. Net assets were about $40.9 billion, and the trust’s reference benchmark is the LBMA Silver Price, a London-set benchmark used widely in the physical market. 5
