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Silver Market FAQ

By the Silver Market Chart editorial team · Updated November 10, 2026

Prices on this page as of (spot quotes from gold-api.com).

These are the questions readers bring to a silver chart most often, answered in a paragraph each. Every answer points to the page that covers the subject properly, so treat this as a map rather than the full story. Nothing here is a forecast or a suggestion to buy or sell; the answers describe how the market works and what the data shows. Figures in the answers come from the same live data as the rest of the site and update with it; as of November 10, 2026, silver spot stands at $51.66 per troy ounce.

The price itself

The headline number on a silver chart looks simple, but it is a summary of several markets at once. The first four questions sort out what that number is, where ours comes from and how it compares with the record set earlier this year.

What is the silver market price?

It is the going rate for one troy ounce of silver in large, wholesale trades, usually called the spot price. Coins and bars sell above it because of premiums. The silver market price chart on our homepage shows the current figure, its recent range and how far it has moved over a week, a month and a year.

Why do the spot price and the futures price differ?

Spot is the price for silver delivered now; a futures contract fixes a price for delivery on a later date, so it can sit slightly above or below spot. The gap is usually small. Our page on spot vs futures price explains how each is set and why charts built on one can disagree with charts built on the other.

Where does this site get its prices?

Spot prices for silver and gold come from gold-api.com, and the history behind the charts comes from COMEX futures data published by Yahoo Finance. Older yearly values come from the US Geological Survey. Everything refreshes every 6 hours, and each figure prints the time it was fetched, so you can always see its age.

How far is silver from its record high?

The record in our data is $121.30, the highest daily high of COMEX silver futures, reached on January 29, 2026. As of November 10, 2026, the price sits 57.5% below that peak. The record is stored separately and only moves upward, so a later high would replace it automatically on the next refresh.

Trading hours and symbols

Silver trades in several places and under several names, which is where a lot of confusion starts. These answers stay at the general level; the dedicated pages go into the detail and name their sources.

When does the silver market open?

Silver futures trade electronically for nearly 24 hours on weekdays, with a short daily pause and a break over the weekend. Activity is heaviest when London and New York overlap. Our guide to when the silver market opens sets out the sessions in Eastern time and explains why the price can move while US markets are quiet.

What does XAG mean?

XAG is the code for silver in ISO 4217, the international list of currency codes, where gold appears as XAU. Price screens use XAG/USD to show silver priced in dollars. Our page on silver ticker symbols lists the common codes for spot, futures and funds and what each one tracks.

Why does the Shanghai silver price differ from New York's?

The Shanghai Gold Exchange sets its own silver benchmark in yuan per kilogram, and once converted to dollars per ounce it can sit above or below the US price. On November 9, 2026 the gap measured +14.8% against the last US futures close. Our page on the Shanghai premium shows how that gap is worked out and how it has moved.

What is SI=F on a price site?

It is the symbol Yahoo Finance uses for its quote of COMEX silver futures, labelled with the current front contract, as shown on Yahoo's quote page. Other platforms use different symbols for the same market. Because futures contracts roll from month to month, a chart built on SI=F joins one contract to the next as each one ends.

Is owning SLV the same as owning silver?

Not quite. SLV is the ticker of the iShares Silver Trust, whose stated aim is to track the price of silver bullion, and its annual report says the trust's assets are mainly silver held by a custodian. You own shares in the trust, not bars you can take delivery of yourself.

History and charts

A long chart answers a different question from a daily one. A week of prices shows noise; decades show the separate eras silver has passed through and the long stretches that separate its peaks. Our long series joins government yearly values, which end in 2021, with yearly averages of the market feed from 2001; where the two overlap, they differ by at most 1.5%.

How has silver done over the last 30 years?

Silver averaged $5.16 an ounce in 1995 and $40.12 in 2025, a change of +678% on yearly averages. The path between was far from smooth, with long flat stretches and sharp spikes. Our silver price chart over 30 years shows the full series and reaches back a century.

How volatile is silver compared with gold?

Over the past year, silver's annualized volatility, the standard deviation of daily returns scaled to a year, measured 69.1%, while gold's measured 28.4%. The two metals still tend to move in the same direction: the correlation of their daily returns over the year was 0.83, on a scale where 1 means they moved in lockstep.

This site and Augusta

One question comes up because of the green buttons. Here is the short version; the full page sets out what Augusta's own pages say and what they leave out.

Who is Augusta Precious Metals, and why is it on this site?

It is the one company this site works with, through an affiliate link. The green buttons request Augusta's free information kit, and Augusta then contacts you by phone. Its standard minimum purchase is $50,000, as stated by Augusta. Our page on Augusta Precious Metals covers who that suits and who it doesn't.

For anything this page skips, start from the live silver chart and follow the links from there.

Sources

Each page we drew a fact from, with whether it was the publisher's own page or a page reporting it.