Gold Rallies, Silver Doesn't as Tech Stocks Sink with Bond Yields

The PRICE of GOLD rallied on Thursday as long-term interest rates fell the fastest in 2 years. But silver prices failed to recover, hitting a 3-month low as global tech stocks plunged, sinking Asian equity markets amid the worsening crash in AI neocloud leader CoreWeave.

Now losing more than 26% this week so far, shares in CoreWeave (Nasdaq: CRWV) have dropped more than 2/3rds of their value from their stock market peak of June 2025.

Giant AI chipmaker Nvdia (Nasdaq: NVDA) owns 10% of the stock, and counts CoreWeave − which buys specialised GPU chips to build data capacity it then rents out to hyperscalers such as Facebook owner Meta (Nasdaq: META) − among its largest customers.

With the 'AI bubble' panic spreading as NVDA's own stock trades nearly 10% below last Monday's fresh all-time high, the price of gold today rebounded to $4150 per troy ounce at London's 3pm benchmarking auction after fixing on Wednesday at the lowest in 10 weeks at $4089.

Silver in contrast − which now finds almost 2/5ths of its physical product demand from electrical and electronic uses − fell again to touch its lowest price since mid-July at $55.41 per ounce, fixing at London's 12 noon auction some $1.20 above that at what was also a 13-week low.

Together, Thursday's action pushed up the Gold/Silver Ratio − a simple measure of the 2 formerly monetary metals' relative pricing − to its highest level since December last year, with one ounce of the 'safe haven' costing more than 73 ounces of the more industrially-useful precious metal.

The Gold:Silver Ratio bottomed during this January's precious metals 'mania' at a 14-year low beneath 46 when gold prices jumped 18.1% across the month but silver leapt by 55.0%.

Over the past 50 years, gold and silver prices have gone in the same direction day-to-day more than 79% of the time.

But across the past 3 months that co-movement has dropped below 76%, and it currently reads beneath 46% so far in October.

That's the weakest such connection between gold and silver prices since the quarter-century low seen last June, back when gold traded around $3300 and silver cost $36 per ounce.

Back in the AI tech sector, CoreWeave's bonds "scream financial distress" says the Financial Times as debt CRWV raised in April trades at 81 cents on the dollar.

Set to report Q3 numbers in mid-November, CoreWeave made a net loss of $626 million on revenue of $2.5 billion in the April-June quarter.

Led by CRWV shares losing more than 15% in Wednesday's New York trade, today's plunge in tech stocks took Japan's Nikkei 225 nearly 5% lower overnight while South Korea's tech-heavy Kospi index lost 7.5% and China's CSI300 fell another 1.2% to set a fresh 15-month low.

Western government bond prices rebounded hard, pulling the rate of interest they offer to new buyers sharply lower from the past week's new quarter-century highs, with the yield on conventional 10-year US Treasury debt plunging by 14 basis points to the lowest in almost a month with the sharpest 1-day retreat since August 2024.

Crude oil prices slipped but held above $100 per barrel again as the Saudi-Houthi conflict continued, Iran struck more vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, and fossil-fuel giant Russia accused Ukraine of hitting an oil refinery south of Moscow after embattled President Zelenskyy said "I'm done" with US President Trump's proclamation of an energy-infrastructure ceasefire ahead of America's mid-term elections.

Like silver, industrial precious metal platinum failed to rally on Thursday, falling to fresh 11-week lows at $1100 per ounce as the US Dollar eased back on the currency market.

Sister metal palladium meanwhile rebounded almost $50 from a new 15-month low of $1092.