Silver Miners: Historic Breadth Breakdown and Widening Underperformance

2. Market Breadth: Selling Reaches Almost the Entire Sector

Market breadth has deteriorated again relative to the previous week.

Weekly distribution

94 declined (95.9%) · 3 advanced (3.1%) · 1 unchanged.

The deterioration is not limited to a higher number of declining companies. The magnitude of losses has also intensified considerably.

In the previous week, 57 securities had declined more than 5%. There are now 83, equivalent to 84.7% of the universe. Declines exceeding 10% have risen from 15 to 37 companies.

This describes a broadly distributed liquidation process. The correction is no longer concentrated in a handful of explorers or speculative companies: weakness extends to established producers, developers, royalty companies, and listed mining investment vehicles.

The near disappearance of advancing securities signals a withdrawal of buying participation. However, until that participation recovers on a sustained basis, oversold conditions may deepen further.

3. Long-Term Trend: MA200 Participation Collapses

The deterioration in the long-term trend is even more significant. Four weeks ago, 44.79% of the comparable sample traded above their 200-day moving averages. That proportion has now fallen to 12.50% on the comparable basis. In the current valid sample, the figure is 12.37%.

Percentage of securities above their 200-day moving averages

The reading from four weeks earlier uses a comparable sample of 96 securities; the last two weeks use 97 valid securities. The bars show the three specified observations, not a continuous historical series.

The weekly decline is particularly abrupt: from 26.80% to 12.37%, a loss of 14.43 percentage points in just one week.

The median distance from MA200 has moved from −12.29% to −18.93%. The typical company in the universe is not merely trading below its long-term trend; it is moving rapidly farther away from it.

Long-term breadth confirms that this is no longer an isolated bout of volatility. There is widespread destruction of the sector's technical structure.

Nevertheless, readings this extreme can also precede sharp rebounds. The problem is that an exceptionally oversold market can keep falling before it finds a bottom.

4. Drawdowns: Accumulated Damage Accelerates

The analysis of declines from 52-week highs confirms the depth of the deterioration.

Figures refer to 96 companies with valid 52-week-high data.

Currently, 73 of the 96 valid companies, or 76.0%, have fallen more than 30% from their annual highs. More than half are at least 40% below their highs, and 36 have lost more than half their value relative to those reference levels.

The 41.49% median drawdown represents a further deterioration of 5.30 percentage points from the previous week.

Moreover, the median decline from the highest price across the full available history is 58.70%, versus 54.54% previously. This latter measure requires caution: companies have price histories of different lengths, and their highs may belong to different market cycles.

Taken together, the data show that this correction is not merely a phenomenon of the last two weeks. Substantial damage is accumulating in price structures that were already weakening.

5. Volume: Strong Selling Imbalance Without Broad Capitulation

Volume analysis provides one of the study's most important qualifications.

Signed volume balance measures the predominance of trading on advancing or declining sessions over the last 20 trading sessions.

Its deterioration to −29.76% reflects a pronounced selling imbalance. Only six companies maintain a positive balance.

However, median relative volume has fallen to 0.82 times its usual reference, and only four securities show trading activity greater than 1.5 times that reference. Moreover, none of those four high-volume securities advanced over the five sessions considered.

The interpretation matters: selling pressure dominates, but there is still no generalized explosion in volume that would identify classic capitulation.

What may be taking place is a gradual withdrawal of buyers combined with persistent selling, rather than a final, extraordinarily concentrated liquidation.

The absence of extreme volume does not rule out an approaching bottom. It simply prevents us from claiming that a bottom has been confirmed by a capitulation signal.

6. Mining Stocks Are Clearly Underperforming Physical Silver

One of this week's most revealing features is the deterioration in mining stocks' relative strength versus SLV, used as a listed proxy for the silver price.

Miner-leadership proportions refer to companies eligible for comparison with the metal, not necessarily all 98 instruments in the complete universe.

The weekly reading is especially negative: only 17.7% of comparable miners managed to outperform SLV, versus 52.1% the previous week. Four-week leadership also dropped, from 47.9% to 29.2%.

This marks a significant change from the October 16 assessment. At that point, silver miners still maintained reasonably balanced short-term relative participation. One week later, that resilience has nearly disappeared.

The contrast across horizons remains significant: although only 17.7% outperformed the metal over one week, 68.4% still outperform it year to date. Recent weakness is therefore much more severe than the cumulative comparison for 2026 suggests.

This behavior is consistent with a phase of reduced exposure to mining equities in which investors prefer the metal to the companies. It does not, by itself, demonstrate that the fundamentals of every business have deteriorated to the same degree.

SIL and SILJ Confirm the Deterioration

Both ETFs lost approximately twice as much as SLV in percentage terms over the week. Weakness is therefore not confined to smaller, less-liquid companies. It also affects vehicles representing diversified groups of silver miners.

7. Performance of Major Companies

Bearish pressure has reached some of the most representative names in silver mining.

The data reveal broad deterioration, even among companies with different business models and risk profiles.

Pan American Silver declined 9.18% for the week, Hecla 9.48%, and First Majestic 7.57%. These are significant losses for well-known, widely followed companies.

The punishment is more severe still at Fresnillo and Hochschild, with weekly declines of 15.08% and 16.87%, respectively.

Wheaton Precious Metals' 9.90% loss is also notable. Its streaming business model has not prevented a substantial share-price correction.

Aya Gold & Silver provides another interesting example: it fell 11.56% this week but is still up 71.33% in 2026. Short-term performance can deteriorate abruptly even for companies retaining highly favorable cumulative returns.

The conclusion is not that all companies carry the same fundamental risk. Rather, selling pressure prevailed over many of their individual differences this week.

8. Where Does Any Relative Strength Remain?

The weekly ranking shows that securities capable of resisting the correction have almost disappeared.

Only three companies ended the week higher, and one was unchanged.

Valor Gold led the week with a 5.22% gain, although it is down almost 35% over four weeks. Its weekly advance is therefore not evidence of sustained strength.

AbraSilver showed comparatively resilient performance, gaining 3.52% and recording a more moderate four-week decline than much of the universe.

Liberty Gold rose only 0.53% but retains a 126.51% return in 2026. Minera Frisco, despite declining 1.32% this week, is up more than 104% year to date.

These examples show that meaningful differences remain among companies. Nevertheless, the relative strength of a few securities does not offset the deterioration of the sector as a whole.

A more convincing recovery would require a sustained broadening of advancing stocks, improved MA200 participation, and a recovery in miners' relative leadership versus SLV.

9. Historical Perspective: Exceptional Deterioration Over Nearly Three Years

Comparison with 152 weekly observations available from December 1, 2023 through October 23, 2026 places the current correction in context.

The conclusion is especially significant: several indicators have reached their most negative levels in the entire sample.

Historical positions refer to available observations for each metric; they are not forecasts or probabilities.

Long-Term Breadth Reaches Its Historical Low

The 12.37% of companies above MA200 is the lowest reading in the series. Within the available history, there has never been such a small proportion of companies maintaining a bullish long-term trend.

Drawdowns Also Reach an Extreme

The 41.49% median decline from 52-week highs is likewise the most negative observation in the historical sample. The coincidence of these two lows matters: not only are many companies declining, but the accumulated damage to their share prices is exceptionally deep.

Selling Pressure Approaches Historical Extremes

The 95.92% share of declining securities is the fourth-highest in the series. The median weekly return of −9.26% is the sixth-worst observation. The −29.76% signed volume balance is the second-most negative reading.

The combination indicates that deterioration is not solely a price phenomenon: it is also evident in breadth, trend, and the distribution of trading activity.

The Loss of Leadership Versus Silver Is Also Exceptional

Only 17.71% of comparable miners outperformed SLV during the week, the sixth-worst reading in the series.

This reinforces a central conclusion of the analysis: mining equities are under especially intense pressure relative to their reference metal.

Relative weakness can become so extreme that a subsequent recovery follows, but the historical observations examined here do not demonstrate that such a recovery must begin immediately.

The historical perspective does not confirm a bottom. It confirms something different: the sector has reached an exceptionally deteriorated condition within the period examined.

10. Conclusion: Is Capitulation Near, or Are Further Declines Ahead?

The SIL–SILJ sector displays an extraordinarily negative combination of technical signals.

Some 95.9% of securities ended the week lower. The median weekly return was −9.26%. Only 12.4% of companies with valid data remain above MA200, while the median drawdown exceeds 41%.

This is compounded by a sharp deterioration in signed volume and a major loss of leadership relative to physical silver.

The historical perspective underscores the severity of the situation: MA200 participation and the median 52-week drawdown are at their most negative levels across 152 available observations.

These conditions justify considering whether the sector may be approaching a zone of seller exhaustion.

However, there is still a fundamental difference between identifying exceptional oversold conditions and confirming a bottom.

Relative volume does not show a broad expansion, the selling imbalance continues to worsen, and very few companies are able to resist the correction.

Therefore, the available evidence is more consistent with persistent liquidation than with final capitulation already completed.

The possibility of a significant investment opportunity deserves attention, especially if current weakness begins to stabilize. But that hypothesis needs further confirmation.

The first signals to monitor would be a sustained recovery in weekly breadth, a rise in the number of securities above MA200, an improvement in signed volume balance, and, especially, renewed relative leadership by miners versus SLV.

This week's conclusion is that silver miners have reached an extreme technical condition. The decisive question is no longer whether the sector is oversold, but when sufficiently strong buying demand will begin to emerge to halt the deterioration.

Scope and limitations: SIL–SILJ is a broad research universe that includes companies beyond pure-play primary silver miners, as well as ETFs and businesses linked to other metals. Conclusions concern this measured universe rather than only primary silver producers. Data denominators vary by indicator. SLV is an exchange-traded proxy, not the physical spot market itself. This is quantitative equity-market research, not personalized investment advice. Read our public methodology.

Complete weekly ranking · 98 instruments

Search by ticker or company, sort any column in both directions, or copy the complete nine-column ranking for Excel. Ranking data is loaded from the original Weekly Analysis publication JSON; missing values are shown as —.

Data and further reading

The complete ranking is presented interactively above. The original JSON is publicly available at ranking.json. No private Excel workbook or proprietary ranking model is published.

Continue exploring

Research archive · Research methodology · Uranium weekly research