Silver Futures Hypotheticals

2026 has been unusual from a perspective that I have never completely removed a market sector from the portfolios based on lack of liquidity. Gold had Silver are a couple of markets that began rejecting market and stop orders with a thin order book at new levels. This affects algorithmic trading system execution and made it impossible to trade our systems without constant manual intervention and chasing the market with limit orders. Precious metals markets were removed from the portfolios.

It has been a disappointing adjustment to make. The extra volatility generated a scenario in our strategies that we were willing to trade through that created a lower percentage of winners with many trades getting stopped out quickly with the massive expansion in ranges while also giving us a chance to capture home runs. From a hypothetical perspective this worked well as the Diversified Portfolio 57 hit new equity peaks this week. Since we are not able to trade Gold and Silver through automation, we did not trade it to these equity peaks after enduring the drawdown.

The performance summary below is an example of how this setup worked by first generating an extended losing streak in a strategy such as Silver MR1, followed by equity peaks. On Monday this strategy showed hypothetical gains of 27,800 per contract while Tuesday's trade showed gains of 23,375.

We still don't recommend trading Silver futures. We continue to monitor the markets for new opportunities as well as an understanding of how order books in many futures markets have "thinned out" over the years.