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Silver’s Biggest Winning and Losing Streaks

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Silver's Biggest Winning and Losing Streaks

Silver’s Biggest Winning and Losing Streaks

With global markets getting off to one of their most volatile starts in history, precious metals have benefited tremendously.

Gold started 2016 on a torrid pace, as investors scrambled to buy physical gold as well as record-amounts of gold ETFs. A quick glance at the year’s best-performing commodities has gold at the top, beating almost everything (except lumber) in dollar terms so far.

Silver, which tends to closely follow gold, has been on a slightly less-skyward ascent.

The gold/silver ratio now sits at 80, which it hasn’t reached for an extended period of time since the early 1990s. This could mean that silver is undervalued, and silver has shown over time that it can jump up in price with sudden, strong movements.

Today’s infographic, which covers silver’s biggest win and loss streaks since 1970, really helps to show the magnitude of this volatility. In fact, silver has gone on 58 such runs where it jumped more than 10% in price in a mere matter of days – compare this to gold, which has only had 31 such streaks.

Silver’s Three Biggest Runs

Silver’s three biggest win streaks all tie into the Hunt Brothers’ cornering of the silver market.

+57.0% in 1974: Silver’s biggest winning streak happened in February 1974, around the time the Hunts began accumulating silver. They were worried about the effect of high inflation on their fortunes, and saw silver as a means to combat a potential loss of buying power.

+37.4% in 1979: As the Hunt Brothers became closer to cornering the market, there were four separate silver runs all over +30% that occurred within 12 months. This was the first one, happening in September 1979.

+55.2% in 1980: This was an eventful time for silver. First, there was Silver Thursday and the Hunts’ margin-call crash, in which the metal would subsequently plummet for its longest-ever losing streak of -57% over 23 days. Then, silver would bounce back in June with its second-biggest winning streak of all-time with a +55.2% stretch over 12 days.

While the most extreme silver price movements can be traced back to the Hunt era, it has still had many big movements in modern times. About 38% of silver’s biggest win streaks (and 40% of its notable losing streaks) have happened since 2000.

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Uranium

Charted: Global Uranium Reserves, by Country

We visualize the distribution of the world’s uranium reserves by country, with 3 countries accounting for more than half of total reserves.

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A cropped chart visualizing the distribution of the global uranium reserves, by country.

Charted: Global Uranium Reserves, by Country

This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.

There can be a tendency to believe that uranium deposits are scarce from the critical role it plays in generating nuclear energy, along with all the costs and consequences related to the field.

But uranium is actually fairly plentiful: it’s more abundant than gold and silver, for example, and about as present as tin in the Earth’s crust.

We visualize the distribution of the world’s uranium resources by country, as of 2021. Figures come from the World Nuclear Association, last updated on August 2023.

Ranked: Uranium Reserves By Country (2021)

Australia, Kazakhstan, and Canada have the largest shares of available uranium resources—accounting for more than 50% of total global reserves.

But within these three, Australia is the clear standout, with more than 1.7 million tonnes of uranium discovered (28% of the world’s reserves) currently. Its Olympic Dam mine, located about 600 kilometers north of Adelaide, is the the largest single deposit of uranium in the world—and also, interestingly, the fourth largest copper deposit.

Despite this, Australia is only the fourth biggest uranium producer currently, and ranks fifth for all-time uranium production.

CountryShare of Global
Reserves
Uranium Reserves (Tonnes)
🇦🇺 Australia28%1.7M
🇰🇿 Kazakhstan13%815K
🇨🇦 Canada10%589K
🇷🇺 Russia8%481K
🇳🇦 Namibia8%470K
🇿🇦 South Africa5%321K
🇧🇷 Brazil5%311K
🇳🇪 Niger5%277K
🇨🇳 China4%224K
🇲🇳 Mongolia2%145K
🇺🇿 Uzbekistan2%131K
🇺🇦 Ukraine2%107K
🌍 Rest of World9%524K
Total100%6M

Figures are rounded.

Outside the top three, Russia and Namibia both have roughly the same amount of uranium reserves: about 8% each, which works out to roughly 470,000 tonnes.

South Africa, Brazil, and Niger all have 5% each of the world’s total deposits as well.

China completes the top 10, with a 3% share of uranium reserves, or about 224,000 tonnes.

A caveat to this is that current data is based on known uranium reserves that are capable of being mined economically. The total amount of the world’s uranium is not known exactly—and new deposits can be found all the time. In fact the world’s known uranium reserves increased by about 25% in the last decade alone, thanks to better technology that improves exploration efforts.

Meanwhile, not all uranium deposits are equal. For example, in the aforementioned Olympic Dam, uranium is recovered as a byproduct of copper mining occurring at the same site. In South Africa, it emerges as a byproduct during treatment of ores in the gold mining process. Orebodies with high concentrations of two substances can increase margins, as costs can be shared for two different products.

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