It got worse for precious metals on Monday if you can believe it.

At one juncture, silver — which fell the most on record Friday — was down another 16% to $71.50 or so at the lows. Gold, which dropped the most late last week in 45 years, dropped another 10% to trade near $4,400.

Both eventually trimmed losses. As of this writing, the jury’s still out on whether the nascent stabilization can hold.

The figure above’s remarkable, but I’d note that Monday’s low for silver, while representing a sharp decline from the last close, actually wasn’t that far removed from Friday’s low if that’s any comfort.

If you’re wondering whether it’s unnerving that the worst day in precious metals history wasn’t followed by a rousing rebound, the answer’s “yes,” but also “no.”

“Yes” because… well, because Friday’s bloodletting was egregious. But “no,” because when momentum trades reverse (and as discussed here just hours before the bottom fell out, that’s all precious metals were by last week: a momentum trade), it can take a few days for things to shake out.

In addition, there’s shenanigans afoot in the Asian metals trade and Monday was the first day those markets were open since Friday’s wipeout. It’s thus hardly surprising that things were — what’s the right word? — still slippery.

I don’t normally say much about these sorts of indicators, but it’s worth noting that silver’s 14-day RSI is now around 40. It was 83 just three sessions ago. For gold, those figures are 52 and 89 (!).

The chart above uses Monday’s low for dramatic effect. This was (almost) an overnight bear market.

Needless to say, that kind of carnage doesn’t happen in a vacuum. There are people — or machines “managing” people’s money — behind this reversal, and those people are de-leveraging, de-risking, selling winners to raise cash and so on into the shock.

Spillover was evident Monday in, among other things, the Kospi, which had its third-worst day since the original pandemic selloff.

Note that the South Korean benchmark’s coming off its best year since 1999 — a stunning 76% advance in 2025. Even after Monday’s rout, it’s still up sharply so far in 2026.

Some of the early-week selloff in Seoul was attributable to Jensen Huang’s equivocation on the scope of Nvidia’s future investment plans in OpenAI. And the Kevin Warsh news is still dragging on EM sentiment (as though Donald Trump didn’t make it clear that a precondition for getting the Fed job was dropping any pretensions to hawkishness).

In any event, the bottom line early Monday was that the unwind in the world’s most crowded trades hadn’t run its course, which makes sense: That unwind was only one day old, after all.