Source: soundmoneyreport
Date: May 26, 2026
2025 saw an India-led explosion in silver investment demand. But with the West largely sitting on the sidelines and inflation poised to return, the real surge may still be ahead for silver investors.
The silver bull market of 2025 was not solely a story of industrial scarcity and depleted exchange vaults. Beneath those well-documented dynamics, a quieter but equally consequential force was gathering momentum: investment demand was staging a comeback — and doing so with a geographic lopsidedness that tells you exactly how much runway remains.
India Leads, the West Watches
Begin with the headline number, courtesy of the Silver Institute’s World Silver Survey 2026: Net coin and bar demand rose 14% year-on-year in 2025 to 217.7 Moz — a solid recovery, but one that masks a striking divergence beneath the surface.
India was the locomotive. Physical silver investment in the country skyrocketed 33% year-on-year in 2025. At the same time, silver ETP holdings tripled from 41.7 Moz to approximately 120 Moz in the twelve months to January 2026 — a figure that speaks to an investor class that has developed an increasingly digitalised appetite for the metal.
In 2024, Silver ETPs already comprised a staggering 40% of India’s total retail investment. However, the country’s continued enthusiasm was so pronounced that it almost singlehandedly rewrote the global ETP narrative in 2025.
Indeed, when ETP investment is brought into the picture, the scope of 2025’s investment renaissance becomes impossible to ignore: Global silver ETP net investment soared 312% year-on-year to 278.1 Moz in 2025.
By March 2026, global silver ETP holdings stood at 1.277 billion ounces, more than double the level of a decade prior.
As a result of this explosive growth and the sheer number of silver ounces being taken off the market, ETPs are a nascently powerful silver price catalyst that, in our view, deserve to be treated as a separate demand category.
Incidentally, the structural supply deficit (which excludes ETPs) was adjusted for -40.3 Moz by the Silver Institute in 2025.
However, once ETP flows are factored in, the total silver market balance widens to a record -318.4 Moz in 2025, marking the largest non-structural deficit in recorded history.
Of course, it’s no coincidence this happened in the same year in which silver formed the base for its January 2026 all-time highs of USD 121.
More broadly, it’s a reminder that investor conviction, especially when it arrives from populous nations such as India, can reshape silver market dynamics as decisively as any industrial end-use.
The West: A Study in Absence
Against the backdrop of this Indian-led charge, the Western world’s silver investors were, to put it plainly, missing in action.
In 2025, US coin and bar demand (somewhat counterintuitively) FELL for a third consecutive year, with volumes dropping to 34.9 Moz — almost half of 2024 levels and the lowest recorded in at least fifteen years.
Meanwhile, European physical silver investment still sat at less than half of its 2022 peak, despite rising a respectable 27% to 28.5 Moz.
Elsewhere, marginal increases in Australia were nowhere near sufficient enough to mark a serious recovery in global physical investment.
Put simply, most Western investors were hopelessly stuck in their MAG 7 bubbles, as India profited handsomely from a burgeoning silver bull.
The Turning Point Approaches?
On paper, it reads like a clean recovery story. India lit the fuse in 2025, and now the West catches up. Simple.
But is it really that straightforward? After all, silver’s nickname — the “devil’s metal” — is owed to a long history of humbling consensus expectations, often through no fault of its own.
Case in point, silver’s share of retail turnover in Germany rose to as much as 30–50% by late January 2026, defying the historical deterrent of VAT. More recently, however, Germany has made investing in silver significantly less attractive overnight. On April 9, the Federal Ministry of Finance announced new rules and ended the VAT exemption for precious metals stored in German duty-free warehouses.
Naturally, with Western Governments making things difficult for silver investors, the questions worth mulling over are as follows:
Firstly, what would actually need to happen for silver investment to graduate from a domestic phenomenon in India to a genuine global renaissance?
Better yet, what are the precise macro conditions that bring the Western investor — currently parked in money markets, chasing AI stocks, and still largely indifferent to silver — off the sidelines and into the metal?
And what happens to the silver price trajectory if those conditions don’t materialise on schedule?
