Silver gave 98% returns in 1 year, but investors made just 18%; 56% investments in loss: Report

Silver has delivered a spectacular rally over the past year, gaining around 98%. But for investors who bought silver during this period, the experience has been very different, their returns were nowhere close to the headline gain.

According to a report by DSP Mutual Fund, the average investor in silver earned just 18% on a money-weighted basis over the past year, compared with the 98% return delivered by the precious metal. More strikingly, 56% of the money invested in silver over the last 12 months is currently sitting at a loss.

The sharp gap between silver’s market return and the returns actually earned by investors highlights a familiar investing trap: chasing an asset after it has already delivered a large part of its gains.


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An asset’s return and an investor’s return can be very different. Silver’s 98% one-year return represents the performance of the underlying asset over the period. An investor’s actual return, however, depends on when they invested and how much they invested at different points in time.

Investors who bought silver earlier and stayed invested would have participated in a larger portion of the rally. Those who invested more aggressively after prices had already risen sharply had a much shorter window to benefit from further gains. This is where FOMO, or fear of missing out, becomes important.

The report said, “FOMO converts past returns into future expectations. Unfortunately, the price you pay determines the return you get.”

Investors often use recent performance as a reference point for what an asset could deliver in the future. But a 98% return over the previous year does not mean someone entering today can reasonably expect another 98% over the next year. The bigger risk with FOMO, therefore, may not be that investors buy the wrong asset, but that they buy the right asset after most of the return has already happened.

The pattern was particularly visible in silver ETFs. At the peak, Rs 11,761 crore of inflows into silver ETFs in January 2026 were equivalent to the cumulative inflows recorded between September 2024 and August 2025, when silver prices were below Rs 1.41 lakh.

This suggests that investor demand became increasingly pro-cyclical — the higher silver prices rose, the more money investors chased the asset, the report said.

The trend is important because it shows how investor behaviour can work against long-term returns. Instead of allocating capital when prices were relatively lower, investors committed significantly more money after the asset had already delivered strong gains.

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The report also highlighted that investor return is measured as the money-weighted return based on monthly net flows into silver ETFs between August 2025 and July 2026. It found that 56% of the money invested during this period had a negative holding-period return as of July 31, 2026.

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