How to Read a Silver Price Chart
Quick answer: Start with three things on any silver chart: what is being plotted (spot or futures), how often (each point a day, a week, a month or a year), and over what range. Then read the shape. A candlestick shows four prices for each period: where it opened, its high, its low and where it closed. A line chart joins only the closes. Silver's one-year volatility, computed from daily moves, is 69.1% as of November 10, 2026.
Daily open, high, low and close of COMEX silver futures (SI=F) from Yahoo Finance, read . Each candle is one futures session, which starts the evening before in New York.
One candle, four prices
The chart above shows the last three months of COMEX silver futures, one candle per trading day. Pick any single candle and it tells you a small story about that day.
The thick part is the body. Its two ends are the opening price and the closing price. If the close was above the open, the day finished higher than it started and the body is drawn in the "up" colour with ▲ in its label; if the close was below the open, it uses the "down" colour with ▼. The thin lines sticking out above and below are the wicks (some people say shadows). The tip of the upper wick is the highest price traded that day; the tip of the lower wick is the lowest.
The annotated candle on the chart labels all four points so you can match the words to the shape. A tall body with short wicks means the price moved steadily one way and closed near its extreme. A short body with long wicks means the price wandered a long way during the day but ended near where it began. Neither shape says anything about tomorrow. It describes how one session unfolded, nothing more.
A trading day on COMEX doesn't follow the calendar day. Electronic trading runs nearly around the clock on weekdays, and many charting services start each daily bar at the evening reopen, so a "Tuesday" candle can include part of Monday evening in New York. That is why a candle from one site can differ slightly from another's if they cut the day at different hours.
Line, candle and bar charts
These three ways of drawing the same data each emphasize something different.
A line chart connects one price per period, almost always the close. It is the cleanest way to see a trend over months or years, and it's what we use for the long ranges on the homepage. It hides what happened inside each period.
A candlestick chart shows open, high, low and close for every period, with the body shaded by direction. It is better for seeing how much the price swung within each day or week, at the cost of more visual noise.
A bar chart (often called an OHLC bar) carries the same four prices as a candle but draws them as a vertical line with a small tick on the left for the open and on the right for the close. It packs the same information into less ink, and some readers find it easier to scan in a dense chart.
None of the three is more accurate. They're different drawings of the same numbers, so choose the one that answers your question.
Choosing a range
The range you pick changes the story a chart tells. Over the past year, silver has moved +2.7%. Over five years, the change is +103%. Measured from one annual average to another across three decades, it is +678%. All three are accurate. Each answers a different question, and a chart that shows only one of them can leave a misleading impression.
Short ranges magnify noise. A one-month chart rescales its vertical axis to fit that month's high and low, so an ordinary wobble can fill the frame and look dramatic. Long ranges compress recent events: a sharp move this year may barely register on a century chart. Looking at two or three ranges side by side is the simplest defence against either distortion.
For the long view, the silver price chart over 30 years plots annual averages back to 1900, with a version in 1998 dollars. If you need exact numbers rather than a shape, the silver price by year table lists each year's average.
Linear or log scale
The vertical axis can be drawn two ways. On a linear scale, every step up the axis adds the same dollar amount. On a logarithmic (log) scale, every step multiplies by the same factor, so the distance from 10 to 20 equals the distance from 20 to 40.
Over a few months, the two look almost identical, because the price doesn't change scale much. Over decades they diverge sharply. On a linear century chart, early prices collapse into a flat line along the bottom and any recent move looks enormous. On a log chart, a doubling in 1970 and a doubling in 2020 rise by the same height, which makes percentage moves comparable across eras.
So check the axis labels before you compare two slopes. If the gridlines are evenly spaced in dollars, it's linear; if they're bunched toward the top or labelled 1, 10, 100, it's log. Our charts state which scale they use.
Futures or spot on the chart
Most silver charts you find online plot one of two things. Spot is the price for metal delivered almost immediately. Futures are the price for delivery in a set month, traded on COMEX under the symbol SI (Yahoo shows it as SI=F). Charts built from futures have clean daily open, high, low and close data, which is why candles usually come from futures. Spot quotes, often shown as XAG/USD, are derived from the futures market and over-the-counter dealing.
At this page's last refresh, spot stood at $51.66 and the front futures contract at $51.53, a gap of $-0.13. That gap reflects carrying costs, interest and storage, and it changes as a contract nears its delivery month and trading rolls to the next one. The roll can leave a small step in a futures chart that has nothing to do with the market moving. The page on spot vs futures price works through the gap in detail, and the guide to silver ticker symbols explains what XAG, SI and SLV each quote.
Volatility in one number
Volatility measures how widely the price has swung, regardless of direction. We compute it from the last year of daily closes: take the natural log of each day's close divided by the previous day's close, find the standard deviation of those daily figures, and multiply by the square root of 252, the approximate number of trading days in a year. The result, 69.1% for silver, is an annualized figure. Computed the same way, gold's is 28.4%.
To turn the annual figure into a sense of a typical day, divide it by about 16 (the square root of 252). That gives the size of an ordinary one-day move, up or down; roughly a third of days move more than that.
For a buyer, volatility is a measure of how bumpy the ride has been. A high number means the price you see at noon may differ noticeably from the price at the close, and that a quote from a dealer can go stale fast. It doesn't tell you direction, and it isn't a measure of risk in any complete sense: it ignores premiums, liquidity and the chance of a long slide that happens smoothly.
Common misreadings
Cherry-picked ranges. A chart that starts at a low point makes any rise look steep; one that starts at a peak makes any period look like a loss. Check where the chart begins and ask why.
Mixed currencies. A silver price in yuan per kilogram, euros per ounce or dollars per ounce can move differently on the same day because the currencies move too. Make sure two charts use the same unit before comparing them.
Stale snippets. A price shown in a search result or a social post may be hours or days old. Look for a timestamp. Every figure on this site carries one.
Daily highs taken as closes. Records are often quoted as the highest price traded on a single day. Silver's record, $121.30 on January 29, 2026, is the highest daily high of COMEX futures, which is higher than any close that day. Comparing it with today's close of a different series overstates the gap a little.
Nominal treated as real. A price from 1980 and a price from today are in different dollars. Without an inflation adjustment, old prices look smaller than they were.
What a chart can't tell you
A price chart can't tell you where silver goes next. Patterns that seemed meaningful in hindsight look like noise in advance, and the same shape on a chart has been followed by rises and falls alike. A chart records what traders paid; it doesn't record why, and it can't account for news that hasn't happened yet. Use it to understand the past and to judge how volatile the market has been, not to time a purchase.
Information, not financial advice. We do not tell you to buy or sell and we do not predict prices. Figures are reference numbers as of the time shown.
Our page on Augusta Precious Metals collects what Augusta says about itself, with the date we read it. To see these ideas applied to today's numbers, open the silver market price chart and switch between its ranges, or check the live quote card at the top of the homepage.
Questions about reading silver charts
What do the colours on a candlestick chart mean?
The body's colour shows direction for that period. One colour means the close finished above the open; the other means it finished below. On this site, rises also carry ▲ and falls carry ▼, so the meaning doesn't depend on seeing colour. The wicks show the high and low and aren't coloured by direction.
Why do two silver charts show different prices for the same day?
They may plot different things: spot versus futures, a close versus an average, or a day cut at different hours. One may be in another currency, or simply older. Check the source, the resolution and the timestamp on each before deciding which number to trust for your purpose.
Is silver more volatile than gold?
Compare the two figures we compute the same way: silver's one-year volatility is 69.1% and gold's is 28.4%. Whichever is larger has swung more over the past year. Silver's market is far smaller than gold's and more tied to industrial demand, both of which can make its moves larger.