Silver (XAG/USD): how much does it move, when, and what moves it?
A $2.73 median day, almost twice gold as a percentage, and a "normal" that is still falling. Measured on 130 days of our own price history.
Silver is usually introduced as poor man's gold: cheaper and the same colour. Resembling gold is exactly what can cost you, because as a percentage silver moves almost twice as much, and its "normal" is still shifting.
This article answers the same three questions as the gold one — how much, when and what moves it — with the same method: one-hour bars in UTC, the last 130 Monday-to-Friday days with data (27 March to 1 October 2026) and figures in dollars. Here we keep to what only silver has. You can follow it live on the silver dashboard.
How much does silver move in a day?
The median daily range — the distance between the day's high and low — is $2.73: on the median, 3.98% of each day's price. Half of all days cover between $2.05 and $4.03; one day in ten stays under $1.58 and another goes past $5.08.
The extreme days go far: 12% went past $5. With 5,000-ounce lots, the convention of our position size calculator, the typical day is about $13,600 per standard lot; your broker may use a different contract. And if you live in the US, the same Dodd-Frank restriction we explain in the gold article applies.
Why does its "normal" keep falling?
Because the window still carries the spring. On two years, the median would be $1.38, half; on one year, $2.94; on three months, $2.21. The silver of two years ago was a different market: in the first quarter of 2026 its median daily range reached 6.36% of price, against 2.04% a year earlier.
In daily UTC closes from our feed, price went from a low of $28.90 (31 December 2024) to a high of $117.94 (28 January 2026), and on 1 October 2026 it closed at $61.12.
What matters is the last few months. Silver calmed between April and July, and since then it has been flat:
| Month of 2026 | Median daily range |
|---|---|
| April | $3.76 |
| May | $3.98 |
| June | $2.79 |
| July | $2.18 |
| August | $2.21 |
| September | $2.29 |
Even so, its 130-day "normal" has kept falling: $4.56 on 30 June, $3.33 on 31 August and $2.73 on 1 October. Silver is not calming further; each day, a busy spring day leaves the window and one of today's quiet days comes in.
That changes what the dashboard tells you. A day below the 25th percentile of its previous 130 days reads "quieter than normal", and measured on the full day that happened on 17 of 21 days in July, 13 of 21 in August and 10 of 22 in September. If silver stays as it has been since July, that share will drift down towards one in four as April and May leave the window, roughly until the end of November. Until then, a "quieter than normal" on silver says as much about the spring as about today.
At what hours does it move?
This is the median range of each hour over the last 130 days:
| Window (UTC) | Median range per hour |
|---|---|
| 00:00–02:00 · Asian morning | $0.55 to $0.77 |
| 03:00–04:00 · Asian midday | $0.32 to $0.43 |
| 05:00–11:00 · Asian afternoon and European morning | $0.39 to $0.61 |
| 12:00–15:00 · London–New York overlap | $0.61 to $0.85 |
| 16:00–19:00 · New York afternoon | $0.39 to $0.47 |
| 20:00–21:00 · daily pause (no bars on 129 of 130 days) | — |
| 22:00–23:00 · reopen | $0.31 to $0.33 |
The peak is at 13:00 UTC, with $0.85, as on gold, and there is another local peak at 01:00 UTC, with $0.77, in the middle of the Asian morning. The difference from gold is the reopen: on silver, 22:00 is the quietest hour of the day, at $0.31, almost level with 04:00; on gold, that same hour is one of the active ones.
The London–New York overlap holds 54% of the range on a typical day, and in Asia silver moves about 73% as much as in the overlap, well above the European pairs, which move roughly half. (The 54% is the median, day by day, of those four hours' range over the whole day's; the 73% compares the average of the hourly medians from 00:00 to 07:00 UTC with that from 12:00 to 16:00.) Which sessions are open right now is on the session clock.
What moves silver?
It moves with gold. Over the last 130 days, daily returns of silver and gold had a correlation of 0.89. That is co-movement, not cause.
The dollar. Against EUR/USD, silver's daily correlation over those 130 days was 0.61, a little lower than gold's (0.64).
Commodities, and this is where it parts from gold. In our study of gold and EUR/USD, on data from January 2021 to August 2026, we measured which metal carries the commodity channel, and in that sample it was silver: with the dollar and gold taken out, it keeps a +0.197 correlation with the Australian dollar, while gold drops to −0.071.
US data. With the same method as the pairs, in the hour non-farm payrolls (NFP) are released, silver's range is 1.68 times that same hour on a normal day, over 64 first Fridays of the month, the usual release day. In that hour it covers 1.45% of its price, against 0.71% for gold and 0.42% for EUR/USD. To size a position with a release ahead, there is the news risk calculator.
Silver or gold to start with?
Lot size is no way to compare, because it is a convention; the percentage is. A typical silver day is 3.98% of its price, against gold's 2.08%, and a busy day (90th percentile) reaches 7.24%, against gold's 3.58%. With the same money at stake, the position travels almost twice as far on silver.
If you trade it anyway, size comes first: decide how much room a position takes before thinking about direction, and fit the stop with ATR (Average True Range), not with the median.
What these numbers do not tell you
The method's limits are the same as for gold — there is no spread or slippage inside, the granularity is one hour, and it is our feed, not every broker's — and silver adds two:
- Its "normal" is on the move. The 130-day median keeps falling even if silver calms no further; the dashboard recomputes it every day.
- The feed has gaps. Five days are missing from the months measured and four more arrived incomplete; on complete days only, the median would be $2.75.
And as always: this describes how silver has behaved, not what it will do tomorrow.
