When Silver Commercials Went Net Long: A Rare COT Signal in Precious Metals
- 09/18/2026
In 2018, something highly unusual happened in the silver futures market: Commercial traders moved net long.
That stood out because silver Commercials are normally net short. Producers and other physical-market participants often use futures and options to hedge future output, so short positioning is a natural part of the market structure.
At the time, silver was trading around $14–$15 per ounce, while the average mining cost Thomas was analysing was around $17. That helped explain why producers had less incentive to hedge future production at those prices.
The result was one of the clearest COT signals Thomas has seen in nearly 20 years of analysing these reports.
Similar Commercial net-long readings later appeared around important silver lows in 2019 and 2022.
Why this matters
The key lesson is not simply that Commercials went net long.
What made the signal important was that their behaviour moved far outside its normal historical pattern — and that change made sense in the context of the physical silver market.
Gold also showed a strong bullish COT setup around the 2018 low, but silver provided the cleaner historical signal because net-long Commercial positioning has been much rarer.
The current precious-metals picture is different
Today, the broader metals positioning picture is more cautious.
COTbase combines positioning from gold, silver, copper, platinum and palladium into a precious-metals complex. That combined reading is currently in bearish territory and shows a larger-than-average bearish extreme.
Copper is also sitting at an all-time COT extreme.
Neither condition means prices must reverse immediately. COT extremes can remain in place for weeks or months before the market reacts.
The important point is that positioning across the sector has become unusually stretched.
What COT data adds
Price shows what the market has done.
COT data can help show how major participant groups are positioned underneath that price action.
That is why extreme positioning can be especially useful when it reflects a real change in behaviour, as it did in silver in 2018.
Watch the full video to see Thomas walk through the silver, gold, copper and broader precious-metals examples in detail.
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