Silver's Drop Has Left Thai Traders in a Bind

By Siam Sukkhee Trading Co., Ltd — 2026-07-12 — metals trading Thailand 2026

I watched silver climb to THB 3,626 per ounce in late January and thought: this ends badly. By July it was sitting near $62.

The metal had just had the kind of year you don't forget. Up 147% in 2025. Genuinely extraordinary. Then the calendar flipped to February and the bill came due.

Three separate things landed at the same moment, which is always how these things work. CME Group tightened margin requirements on silver futures on February 6. The Federal Reserve signaled no rate cuts were coming, which sent the dollar up. And traders who'd made money—a lot of money—decided to take it off the table. None of it was a secret to anyone paying attention. But all three at once? That doesn't give you a gradual decline. That gives you a rout.

Leveraged traders got squeezed out first.

The supply picture, though. That's where the actual story lives. China sits on something like 60 to 70 percent of global refined silver production, and they put an export licensing system in place at the start of this year. Meanwhile COMEX inventory is down roughly 70 percent over five years—actual physical metal, not some accounting abstraction. Industrial demand from solar panels and electric vehicles just keeps buying whatever exists. The supply deficit is now six years running.

Actually, that's not quite right. It's not a deficit yet in the sense that nobody can get silver. It's tightness. Tightness is different from a real shortage. But the direction is fairly obvious, and it's not the direction the short-term price has been moving.

Here's what's happening in Thailand specifically. Someone bought near the peak. Now they're staring at a 44 percent loss and they're not selling—not yet, anyway. Buyers on the other side watched the whole decline from $121 down to $62 and they're thinking: why would I rush? Silver came from somewhere, it can come from there again. So traders are just sitting. Waiting.

This standoff doesn't move fast.

Gold has been steadier, more or less. Up 27 percent year-on-year because Asian central banks keep buying and they don't care about margin calls or currency moves the way futures traders do. Silver doesn't have that anchor. It's both an investment metal and something you actually need in industry, so everything affects it—the dollar, Fed policy, what China's manufacturing numbers look like, CME rule changes, you name it.

Copper's got its own problem. Stronger dollar on one side, US tariff uncertainty on the other, and neither of those things is resolving this year.

J.P. Morgan thinks silver gets to $90 to $106 by year-end. That forecast depends on the Federal Reserve doing something it hasn't done yet and on industrial demand not cracking in an economy that's showing genuine soft spots. Maybe both things happen. Maybe they don't.

The two-year case for silver looks cleaner than the two-month case. The supply deficit is real. The industrial demand is real. But that blow-off top in January left a hangover that's still here, and anyone telling you they know where the floor is on this trade is either guessing or they've already made their money and don't mind being wrong anymore.

Tags: CME Group, silver prices, Thailand silver correction 2026