Fifteen Years Predicting Silver Prices Weekly

Silver Pools: Fifteen Years Trying to Nail the Close

Where will silver be next weekend? Every Sunday for the past fifteen years, a group of precious metals enthusiasts has answered that question in writing with a two-decimal figure. The ounce has moved during this time between the $17.25 of the most conservative bets and the three-digit quotes appearing in the latest messages. The exercise has rules, tables, weekly champions, and even a raffle for a physical ounce. It's not just a casual chat.

The Rules: Betting on Weekends with a Ten-Cent Gap

The mechanism is as simple as it is inflexible. You have to guess the closing price of a silver ounce in euros the trinc Friday. The reference is the closing price from a precious metals market portal. Predictions are submitted between Saturday and Sunday, and those who bet on Sunday must do so before midnight; anyone who misses the deadline sees their figure marked in red, like a failed exam pinned to a corkboard.

Add another restriction: there must be a ten-cent difference between one bet and the next. This turns each week into a chess game where choosing the wrong number not only means missing the forecast but also being disqualified for stepping on someone else's square. Over time, the joke has generated a leaderboard with tiebreakers, colorful podiums, and a weekly score table. The tie-breaking criteria—highest podium, fewest participations, earliest score, and finally alphabetical order—are reviewed manually. More than a chat, this is the management of a modest league.

Even the way the figure is written is debated. "In fact, it's better to put the number with two decimals first, trinc by about 3 spaces, and then the name," declared one of the veterans, after the last digit of a bet disappeared when moving to the next line on a mobile phone. Details like these separate a serious prediction pool from a joke.

What the Silver Ounce Has Done During the Experiment

Initially, the figures hovered around 30 euros. A bet of €30.48 was nailed with a close of €30.40 and hailed as a historic victory. Then came the fall: forecasts of €23.10, €22.90, €22.50, and even lower, €22.10, €22.78. Then the metal moved to dollars.

In a later phase, the ranges dropped to $17.76, $18.20, $19.19. And then, almost suddenly, the March crash—attributed as one of the best buying opportunities in the entire series—gave way to a rally that left almost everyone staring at the screen with their mouths open. The table reconstructed by a participant from the weekly records shows the unadorned jump: the close went from $18.01 to $28.27 in just five weeks.

No one saw it coming. "We're all going to be short," admitted one forecaster as the metal rose. Another had bet $20.66, saw it already at $21.66, and doubted if Friday would reach $22.66. The euphoria of the bets, measured in dollars, acted as a reverse thermometer.

The Added Problem of the Euro Against the Dollar

Although the competition is settled in euros, much of the analysis is done on the dollar chart, and there appears the usual noise: without knowing what the exchange rate will do, accurately predicting the weekly close in euros is guessing twice. One participant explained it plainly: he predicted $44.35 on Friday, risked €31.50, and admitted he had no idea what the euro would do against the greenback. The double exercise—metal and currency—is what makes the game more like betting than investing.

The Group Average as a Leading Indicator

One of the members took the trouble to calculate the average of all forecasts each week. The first time he did it with complete data, with 19 participants, it came out to $17.7626. The trinc week, 21 people and $17.8862. And then, with a record 22 participants, the average rose to $18.0836, just above the $18 resistance that took weeks to break.

The striking part is that this average behaved like a magnet. The actual price touched the group's average and reversed with the precision of a donkey's stop. Only one week in the entire series came within a cent of reaching it. When the average of the bets got out of hand—to an average of $29.20 against a close of $28.27—the correction came on its own. The group's expectations acted as a contrarian signal.

The Candlesticks of an Insomniac

From this came the most curious experiment of the series. Another participant, during a sleepless night, took the weekly tables, transferred them to a spreadsheet, and constructed Japanese candlesticks: the average of the bets as the opening, the minimum and maximum of the predictions as the extremes, and the actual close as the closing price. One candle for each week.

The result confirmed what the average had already suggested: when the group got euphoric, the price reversed. That statistic of collective illusion, without any academic pretension, said more about mass behavior than many analysis desk reports. And it all came from cleaning up a bet file.

The Raffle of an Ounce and the Season Finale

Over the years, the matter generated its own rituals. There was a raffle for a physical ounce of silver: the winning bet of the week was taken, its digits were added up—2+7+5+5=19—and the ounce went to the 19th-ranked participant overall. A consolation prize with all the logic in the world, announced with more solemnity than many shareholder meetings.

And there was a season finale. In December, a participant was proclaimed champion "surprisingly," according to the organizer's minutes, and congratulations and "Merry Christmas, metalheads" trinc. Just before, someone pointed out an intuition that time would test: now that the contest was over, the metal would take off.

The liturgy had its human side. "I love the weekend when my little daughter, 8 years old, comes and tells me, 'Daddy, I'll help you with the silver numbers,'" recounted a participant. The girl already knew all the nicknames on the list.

The Comeback: Silver in Three Digits

The matter didn't die. Years later, someone peine the conversation with a simple "time to revive." And the figures that appeared then were no longer $18 or $26. Some spoke of seeing the price in three digits and others put $100 on the table. Some discussed whether the metal would correct before a new rise; others, at what point it would test $55, and how high it would go in 2030.

Along the way, someone recovered a wave chart and another countered that wave 2 cannot be smaller than wave 1. A third concluded that no machine exists capable of simulating the strokes of that drawing and the sensations it transmits. We're back to the usual: faith in someone else's chart and a figure in hand.

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Fifteen years predicting the Friday close. Thousands of figures, tables, raffles, and colorful podiums. And the Sunday question still lacks an answer that holds up until closing. The consolation remains that whoever guesses correctly—when they guess correctly—will be able to claim their ounce.