Why Gold and Silver Are Embarrassing Tech Right Now VIEW IN BROWSER By Michael Salvatore, Editor, TradeSmith Daily In This Digest: - The fate of Venezuela’s oil is way up in the air
- Don’t ignore precious metals in a volatile 2026
- What our seasonality data says about gold and silver
- This one big miner is set to surge 5% in the coming weeks
- And these two show not all miners are a no-brainer
Looks like oil will continue to flow out of Venezuela… Right now, only one publicly traded U.S. company, Chevron (CVX), is allowed to service Venezuelan oil exports. It benefits from a license put in place by the U.S. Treasury Department that allows it to produce and export oil from joint projects with the state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela. Initially, oil prices jumped as the United States’ capture of Nicolás Maduro put a temporary hold on exports. But yesterday, headlines showing that Chevron was sending 11 tankers there to continue exports brought oil prices to where they sat on Friday, before the capture. The fate of Venezuela, and its oil, is still high up in the air. Despite claims from the White House that it’s in control, the Venezuelan government is reasserting itself under leadership with the former vice president, Delcy Rodríguez. Rodríguez has publicly rejected the White House’s claim that it’s running the country, saying Venezuela remains sovereign and that no foreign power runs the country. At the same time, President Trump claimed late Tuesday that Venezuela will be “turning over between 30 and 50 million” barrels of oil to the U.S. After that $2.8 billion worth of oil is sold, the proceeds will apparently go to “benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States.” And that brings us back to that word again: uncertainty. | Recommended Link | | | | Rare earths and other critical mineral stocks exploded higher last year – you could have doubled your money 28 different times in 2025. But now the man ranked in 2020 as America’s #1 stock picker says the White House is set to buy a whole new group of stocks, in the biggest government buying spree in history. Here’s the name and ticker of every stock that could be next. |  | | That’s good news for gold and silver… Investors are responding to uncertainty by buying these precious metals hand over fist. That’s sent them soaring above the Magnificent 7 tech stocks. 
As you can see going back the past three months, gold (green line) is up 13%, and silver (blue line) is up 70%. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 and the Mag 7 stocks as a group (dark blue and orange) are up about 3% each. And that’s no surprise. Gold and silver have traditionally acted as bolt holes for investor capital when uncertainty is on the rise. For example, during the pandemic crash in early 2020, it took the S&P 500 five months to recover its pre-crash high. Meanwhile, gold shot up 20%. And silver rocketed 44%. Gold soared in the wake of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. From its low in 2008 to its peak in September 2011, gold climbed from about $700 to $1,900 an ounce – a gain of roughly 170%. The market isn’t crashing right now, like it was in 2020 and 2008… Not even close. Yesterday, the S&P 500 closed at an all-time high. But our Age of Chaos theme is in full swing, driven by the breakdown of the global order, the corruption of money through persistent inflation, and exponential advances in technology, most notably AI. The coup in Venezuela is just one more entry in a long list of geopolitical surprises that include wars in Easten Europe and the Middle East. Gold and silver are ripping higher as a result. And TradeSmith’s tools and analytics are a great way to stack the odds in your favor. Let’s look at these metals through the lens of seasonality… Seasonality is the market’s habit of repeating itself. Over decades of trading, certain stocks tend to rise and fall at roughly the same times of year – often for very ordinary reasons like earnings cycles, crop harvests, tax deadlines, or institutional rebalancing. When you study enough history, those rhythms stop looking random – and start looking tradeable. And that’s what our Seasonality tool does. By combing through more than 2 quintillion data points – covering decades of price history and other variables across thousands of stocks – it can pinpoint dates of the calendar when certain stocks tend to rise year after year. And in our back-testing going back to 1991, we found these signals have an 83% accuracy rate. Let’s take a look at the seasonal charts for gold and silver, focusing on midterm-year seasonal cycles. And let’s use the popular gold-backed ETF, SPDR Gold Trust (GLD) as a proxy for the metal. 
Over the past five midterm election cycles that the GLD has traded, it’s seen a sustained run of performance from the start of the year through to May 12. For every one of those cycles, gold has been higher during this stretch for an average return of 12.16%. And in the middle of that stretch is a pocket of outperformance from Feb. 6 to March 4, where gold has been up 100% of the time for an average return of 4.4% From May onward – as midterm election season heats up ahead of the vote in November – gold tends to experience a broad decline with several bouts of pronounced losses. Now, let’s look at silver: 
Silver does not share the same seasonal strength early in the year as gold does. Barring a small seasonal pop at the start of the year, taking it on average 4% higher through Jan. 14, it’s historically spent the midterm year chopping up and down. Then in early November – once the midterm elections have been decided – silver has seen a consistent run through Dec. 14 for an average gain of 12.6%. This mining stock is flashing a strong AI buy signal right now… Predictive Alpha Prime is TradeSmith’s elite trading research service that harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to forecast where over 2,300 stocks could go in the next month, with the help of TradeSmith’s proprietary AI-based algorithm, Predictive Alpha. Our Predictive Alpha Prime algorithm is forecasting a big move in Newmont (NEM) right now, of a 5.1% gain by Feb. 3: 
And another one of TradeSmith’s newest indicators is lighting up with new mining stock ideas. Let’s look at the top Short-Term Health signals in the mining sector… When we get a Flash Buy signal from this indicator, it’s an ideal way to catch briefer trends that may last less than three months, though some can extend longer. To give you an idea of potential upside – stocks in the S&P 500 gained 13.7% after turning green in our Short-Term Health indicator, on average, in our backtesting. One mining stock, North America-based Coeur Mining (CDE), entered the Short-Term Health Green Zone just last Friday. And its previous Green Zone entry saw the stock run from $7.39 per share last May to as high as $18.31 per share in mid-October. 
Not every metals stock is flashing green, though. Check out this chart of gold miner Caledonia Mining (CMCL): 
CMCL had a strong stretch of performance since its last Short-Term Health buy signal last April. It sprung from $11.18 a share to as high as $37.53, more than tripling in price. It’s since given a lot of those gains back, falling as low as $24. And on Dec. 15, it entered the Short-Term Health Red zone, a sell signal in our system. Precious metals miners may be broadly hot right now, but not every company is going to participate in that trend equally. So owning individual mining stocks increases risk along with the potential rewards. If you’re going to go that route, just make sure to do your due diligence. To building wealth beyond measure, 
Michael Salvatore
Editor, TradeSmith Daily Disclosure: Michael Salvatore holds shares of Tesla (TSLA) at the time of this writing. | 
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