Jen Bawden says the gold and silver selloff buying opportunity is real after Friday’s market rout pushed both metals into a modest rebound. The founder of Bawden Capital called the move a rare entry point, even as prices stayed under pressure from higher rate expectations and a broader liquidity squeeze.
“Silver is about 60% below its $121.64 record, and gold hit a one-year low,” she said in her latest market commentary. That line captures the scale of the drop: silver’s decline is not a routine pullback, and gold’s one-year low shows how sharply the trade reversed after weeks of weakness.
Bawden Capital on precious metals
Bawden framed the selloff in unusually blunt terms. “Mainstream financial headlines are screaming about a precious metals wipeout, and retail traders who bought the highs are capitulating in sheer panic. To the untrained eye, it looks like a massacre,” she said.
She then drew the opposite conclusion. “To seasoned resource investors who understand global capital flows, paper-market mechanics, and cross-asset margin shocks, this is NOT a crisis; it is the exact liquidity air pocket we have been waiting for.”
That is the core divide in the trade. Retail buyers who chased the highs are nursing losses, while Bawden is treating the same price action as a setup created by forced selling and thin liquidity. Gold and silver had already struggled in recent weeks, and Friday’s rout capped their worst October performance since 2008.
Federal Reserve pressure
Rates are part of the strain. Markets still expected rates to move higher in December after the Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged last week, a backdrop that raises the opportunity cost of holding metals that do not yield interest.
Equities added to the pressure. The S&P 500 lost 2% ahead of the weekend, its biggest drop since early June, and that broader selloff fed the same margin stress and cash demand that can force traders out of commodity positions.
Middle East dollar demand
Bawden also linked the metals weakness to energy and currency flows. She said broader geopolitical uncertainty and the global energy supply crisis stemming from the ongoing war in the Middle East were driving short-term volatility, and that disruptions to energy supplies were creating significant demand for U.S. dollars.
In her view, when conflict disrupts transit in the Strait of Hormuz and oil shoots up past $100, commercial importers in Japan, South Korea, Germany, and India are pushed to dump domestic currencies to buy dollars. That dollar demand can weigh on precious metals even when the broader story looks bullish on paper.
Kitco Global Index is designed to show how much of gold’s move is coming from the dollar side versus the metal itself, which is the split traders need to watch when currency stress and metal selling hit at the same time. For now, Bawden is betting the latest washout is the kind of dislocation investors wait for, not the end of the trade.
