Silver gained 140% in 2025. I checked, and that’s not the name of a retro-ironic cryptocurrency spun out from, say, AngryHamsterRugPull or ButtToken. It’s the actual metal from column 11 of the Periodic Table of Elements. That’s a hot column, as it turns out. One space up from silver is copper, up 36%. One down is gold, up 69%.
The whole neighborhood shot higher in 2025, really. One column to the left, platinum jumped 133%, and palladium, used to cut smog in car exhaust, 95%. Two to three columns to the right, aluminum rose 15%, and tin, 49%. And have you seen the price of adamantium and vibranium?
That was a test; those come from Marvel superhero movies. If we’re going to have a chance at keeping up with markets in 2026, we might need to develop a view on some of the transitional metals, or middle-right-of-the-table stuff used in industry, jewelry, and coinage. Throw on a lab coat, spark a Bunsen burner, and stay close to the eyewash station, but hopefully it won’t come to that.
Wall Street categorizes metals as precious, base/industrial, and maybe “other” for the weird ones. There is plenty of overlap. Precious metals include gold and silver, of course, but also palladium, for its rarity, high value, and corrosion resistance, even though demand for it is dominated by the car industry. Base metals are common, reactive, and often useful in manufacturing, like copper, zinc, nickel, and tin.
Uranium is neither precious nor base. Its magic trick is that 0.7% of the element found in nature is fissile. If you can increase that concentration to 3% or 5%, you can fuel a nuclear power plant.
The electricity demands of artificial-intelligence data centers have helped bring nuclear power back into fashion. Uranium gained some 11% in 2025, and is up 168% over the past five years. You can call cobalt a base metal, or stick it with uranium in special metals. It’s used mostly for batteries, including ones for electric vehicles. Cobalt’s price jumped 115% in 2025.
A surge in metal demand can come from a hot economy, supply interruptions, or a technology shift, as with uranium and cobalt. For precious metals, it can come from fears of monetary debasement, or from missing out on gains, or both.
U.S. federal debt is a daunting 115% of gross domestic product. The deficit, or ongoing budget shortfall that is adding to the debt, was $1.8 trillion over the past year, versus $1.4 trillion at the most desperate point of the global financial crisis, in 2009. The U.S. dollar is down 10% in 2025 against a basket of key foreign currencies. The Federal Reserve has been cutting interest rates, even though inflation remains above its target. On the bright side, economic growth has been robust.
This combination has powered gold from $2,068 per troy ounce two years ago to $4,479 recently. A troy ounce is 1/12th of a pound. (For more than you surely want on troy ounces and other gold minutiae, see our cover story from April, back when gold was at $3,406 an ounce: “Gold is Beating Everything. How to Get a Piece of the Action.”) Gold has now beaten the S&P 500 index, not just in 2025, but over the past two decades, 791% to 703%.
There is a lot of metallurgical whataboutism that goes on in commodities forecasting. A Barron’s colleague, Greg Bartalos, argued presciently last February that silver was undervalued based on its ratio to gold. This past week, Ned Davis Research concluded the opposite, that the “gold/silver ratio shows gold oversold with [a] bullish outlook supported by...real interest rate and currency trends.”
Price targets? Take your pick. RBC Capital says gold is headed to $4,800 by the end of 2026. Société Générale says $5,000. Economist Ed Yardeni has a particularly shiny forecast. In his view, gold and the S&P 500, recently 6,934, are following the same trendline. “If the S&P 500 reaches 10,000 by the end of 2029, as we expect, gold should trade at $10,000,” he wrote this past week.
Gold has no earnings or dividends, which makes pegging its fundamental value difficult. One guidepost is the all-in cost of mining the stuff, but we are too far removed from that for it to be much help. RBC reckons the cost will rise from $1,569 an ounce in 2025 to $1,715 in 2026.
That means that gold miners are making preposterous profits. Their returns on invested capital are approaching those of the technology sector. In 2024, gold miner stocks lagged well behind the gold price, but in 2025, they shot ahead of it. So far, the companies have been uncharacteristically prudent with their windfalls, paying down debt and buying back stock rather than spending wildly on takeovers.
If there is a consensus bullish opinion on Wall Street now, it is copper. J.P. Morgan likes it for “acute supply disruptions, fragile ex-U.S. inventories, and renewed Chinese buying,” and says to buy shares of Freeport McMoRan.
UBS agrees, and also likes Anglo American, traded in London, and Teck Resources. Its other favorite metals for 2026 are aluminum, where it recommends shares of Norsk Hydro, and lithium, where it likes Albemarle. For gold, the risk and reward have grown less favorable, but apparently not unfavorable: “No bull market lasts forever, but in our view it is too early to call the top,” writes UBS. There it likes Barrick Mining.
For a scattershot approach, there’s the State Street SPDR S&P Metals & Mining exchange-traded fund, but it’s half in steel and coal, with 16% in gold, 9% in aluminum, and 5% in silver. For more luster, there’s the Invesco DB Precious Metals ETF, but it’s poshly priced, with expenses of 0.79% a year.
Note that crypto lately hasn’t been living up to its billing as digital gold. In 2025, the Nasdaq Crypto Index, which tracks Bitcoin, Ethereum, and less memorable ones, is down 15%.