What if you bought Silver (oz) in 1990?
Commodities · Metal. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play11.5× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in Silver (oz) at the start of 1990 would be worth about $11,538 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Silver is gold's more excitable sibling: partly a monetary metal, partly an industrial one used in electronics, photography (once) and, increasingly, solar panels. Through the 1990s it went nowhere, stuck near five dollars an ounce as the decline of film photography removed a major source of demand. The commodity boom of the 2000s and the arrival of silver ETFs lifted it, and after the financial crisis it went parabolic, reaching nearly $50 in April 2011, roughly matching the 1980 spike engineered during the Hunt brothers' attempted corner.
What followed was a textbook bust: the price fell by around two thirds by late 2015 and then spent years in a narrow range. In early 2021 online forums tried to stage a silver squeeze in the wake of GameStop, which produced headlines more than lasting gains. The real move came later, as solar-panel manufacturing consumed ever more silver, supply deficits persisted, and gold's surge pulled silver along; in 2025 it finally broke clearly above its old $50 ceiling. Over the period, nearly all the gains came in two violent episodes.
The lesson: Silver behaves like gold with leverage, amplifying the same macro story in both directions; volatility that large makes entry price matter enormously.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $5.20 | $11,538 | $19,429 | 11.5× |
| 1995 | $4.80 | $12,500 | $14,783 | 12.5× |
| 2000 | $5.30 | $11,321 | $4,626 | 11.3× |
| 2003 | $4.70 | $12,766 | $7,727 | 12.8× |
| 2005 | $6.60 | $9,091 | $5,763 | 9.1× |
| 2007 | $12.50 | $4,800 | $4,789 | 4.8× |
| 2008 | $15.00 | $4,000 | $4,626 | 4.0× |
| 2010 | $17.00 | $3,529 | $6,071 | 3.5× |
| 2012 | $30.00 | $2,000 | $5,312 | 2.0× |
| 2015 | $16.00 | $3,750 | $3,301 | 3.8× |
| 2018 | $17.00 | $3,529 | $2,519 | 3.5× |
| 2020 | $18.00 | $3,333 | $2,092 | 3.3× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2003, turning $1,000 into $12,766. The S&P 500 from that same year: $7,727.
On this day
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Silver (oz) is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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