Market News Today

January 26, 2026

Silver and Gold

We’ve spoken a lot about gold here.  Gold is rising again today (+2%) above $5000 for the first time ever.  

And what about silver?!   Here’s a fun fact for you.  The price of silver is up 134% in the past 3 months!  It’s up about 250% over the past year.  Unlike gold, silver actually has many industrial uses.  Silver has the highest electrical and thermal conductivity of any metal.  So, silver is used in solar panel arrays, cooling systems in data-centers, medical applications, and many other things. 

The AI data center cooling system implication is getting most of the attention these days.  This high level of industrial demand (similar to copper) is making it a secondary choice for central bank reserve assets.  Anything other than the US dollar.  In fact, gold recently surpassed US treasuries as the largest asset held by global central banks globally.

The size and speed of the move in silver means that it could be a speculative bubble.  But it’s hard to parse out the difference between “natural” buyers (who want it for industrial reasons or central bank reserves) and pure speculators.  

The only other times that silver has spiked so much was in 1979 and 2010.  In 1979, silver spiked because of an attempt by the Hunt brothers to corner the silver market.  (Fascinating story.  Google it sometime.)  In 2010, silver spiked because the market was concerned that new quantitative easing would lead to hyperinflation.  However, both spikes eventually faded, and silver fell significantly soon after.

Natural Gas

Nat gas is spiking to a multi-year high today (+17% today, +87% the past 3 months), after a massive winter storm and record low temperatures affected a majority of the United States.  This is due to the 1-2 punch of (1) cold temperatures creating supply disruptions and (2) cold temperatures increasing the demand.  On top of this, the US is increasingly a major exporter of LNG to Europe and Asia. 

The US enjoys a structural massive supply of natural gas underground.  So these prices should revert to the mean (eventually).  But the trend in rising electric bills will likely continue in the short-term.

Earnings Season

Big week for earnings season this week.  Tomorrow alone, 21 members of the S&P 500 will report earnings.   Among the mega-caps, this week we’ll get results from Apple (AAPL), Meta (META), Tesla (TSLA), Visa (V), and Exxon (XOM).   XOM should be particularly interesting to see what they have to say about developments in Venezuela

Arista Networks (ANET)

JPM had a very bullish report out this morning on this network hardware/software provider, saying its deployment in AI is “higher than recognized” and “set to inflect further”.   ANET is only about the 100^th largest S&P 500 stock.  But it’s a key performer in our AI basket.  Shares are up today on the report.

Coreweave (CRWV)

Coreweave got a big vote of confidence today, with a $2bn investment from AI-chip leader Nvidia (NVDA).   Coreweave is a data cloud provider.  It’s similar in scope to the big guys like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, but CRWV’s platform is built specifically for high speed compuing like the type needed for AI LLM’s.   The company just went public in spring of last year, and it’s not in the S&P 500.  But as you can imagine, it’s a core player in the AI basket going forward.