Gold and Silver Crush the S&P 500 and Copper in Historic Two-Year Rout
How Gold & Silver Delivered a 100%+ Beatdown to Stocks and Copper While Everyone Was Watching the Fed
For the past twenty-four months, anyone still betting solely on the S&P 500 or the “Dr Copper” thesis has been quietly handed a masterclass in humility. While global equities and the world’s favorite industrial metal posted respectable gains, gold surged more than 103 percent and silver rocketed an eye-watering 144 percent through early December 2025. That’s not outperformance, that’s a different league entirely.
Let that sink in: the classic “risk-on” bellwether (the S&P 500) returned roughly 44 percent over the same stretch, including dividends. Copper, the metal everyone loves to call the economic PhD, managed about 38 percent. Precious metals didn’t just beat them, they lapped them twice and still had energy left for an encore.
The divergence is now impossible to ignore. From New Year’s Eve 2023 to the first week of December 2025, an ounce of gold climbed from $2,063 to $4,187. Silver, the rowdier sibling, sprinted from $23.80 to $58.03. These are not rounded marketing figures; they are the actual settled prices reported by the major exchanges. Triple-digit gains for both metals are no longer debatable, they are historical fact.
What makes this rally different from the 2011 blow-off top or the 2020 pandemic spike is the combination of forces that aligned perfectly. Persistent geopolitical friction in Eastern Europe and the Middle East kept safe-haven bids alive. Central banks, led by China, India, Poland and Turkey hoovered up more than 1,000 tonnes of gold in both 2024 and 2025, the highest two-year total ever recorded. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve delivered 150 basis points of cuts starting in late 2024, slashing the opportunity cost of owning non-yielding metals and sending the U.S. dollar index down roughly eight percent from its peak.
Silver, however, refused to be just a monetary story. Explosive growth in solar panel manufacturing and electric-vehicle production triggered a structural supply deficit that the Silver Institute estimates exceeded 250 million ounces in 2025 alone. When you combine investment demand, central-bank buying and an industrial shortfall that big, the math only points one direction: dramatically higher prices.
Copper tried to keep pace with the green-energy narrative, but its price action stayed stubbornly tied to the global PMI cycle. China’s on-again, off-again stimulus and fresh tariff threats from the incoming U.S. administration capped upside, leaving the red metal tracking equities almost tick-for-tick instead of breaking out with its precious cousins.
The message from the market has rarely been clearer. When inflation refuses to fall back to the Fed’s two-percent target (core PCE closed November 2025 at 2.8 percent), when geopolitical risk refuses to fade, and when physical supply of a critical industrial metal simply cannot keep up with solar and EV demand, capital flows toward assets that hedge those realities. Gold and silver have spent the last two years proving they remain the ultimate beneficiaries of that environment.
Investors who rotated even a modest slice of their portfolio into the precious-metals complex in early 2024 are sitting on gains most equity managers can only dream about. Those who waited for the “inevitable correction” are still waiting – and watching prices print fresh all-time highs.
The precious-metals supercycle isn’t whispering anymore. It’s shouting from the tape, and the numbers are doing all the talking.