Commodities

How to Trade Gold and Silver: A Commodities Guide

Astron Team · 09/24/2026 · 4 min read

Gold and silver are among the oldest assets ever traded by humanity, but they remain present in modern portfolios for a practical reason: they react to different factors than stocks and currencies, which makes them useful both for people seeking diversification and for those who like trading short-term moves.

Before opening your first position in these assets, it's worth understanding what actually moves the price of each one, how they relate to each other, and what risk precautions are specific to commodities.

What moves the price of gold

Gold is treated by the market as a store of value, not as an industrial raw material for most of its demand. Because of that, its price reacts strongly to three factors: the strength of the US dollar (gold is priced in dollars, so a weaker dollar tends to make gold more expensive in other currencies), real interest rates in the United States (lower real rates reduce the opportunity cost of holding an asset that pays no income), and demand for safety during moments of political or economic instability, when investors seek an asset seen as safer.

What moves the price of silver

Silver shares part of the "store of value" narrative with gold, but has one important difference: more than half of its demand comes from industrial use, mainly in electronics and solar panels. That makes silver's price also react to industrial activity and manufacturing data, not just to market sentiment around the dollar and interest rates. In practice, this makes silver historically more volatile than gold — it tends to rise more during rallies and fall more during corrections.

The gold/silver ratio

A practical way to compare the two metals is to divide the price of gold by the price of silver. If gold is trading at US$ 2,400 an ounce and silver at US$ 28 an ounce, the ratio is 2,400 ÷ 28 ≈ 85.7 — meaning it would take 85.7 ounces of silver to "buy" one ounce of gold. When this ratio rises well above its historical average, some traders read that as a sign that silver is relatively cheap compared to gold, and vice versa when the ratio drops a lot. It's a relative reading, not an absolute price prediction.

Converting to your local currency

Since metals are quoted in dollars per troy ounce, a simple step avoids confusion when sizing a trade: multiply by the dollar exchange rate. With the dollar at R$ 5.00, one ounce of gold at US$ 2,400 equals R$ 12,000; one ounce of silver at US$ 28 equals R$ 140. A 1% change in gold's dollar price, in this example, represents R$ 120 per ounce — and this math shifts whether the metal moves or the exchange rate moves, so both risks need to be considered together, not separately.

How to analyze these assets' charts

Gold and silver respond well to classic technical analysis: moving averages to identify trend, volatility indicators to adjust position size, and special attention to US economic data releases (inflation, employment, interest rate decisions), which tend to trigger sharp moves in both metals on the same day. Short-term traders do well to check the economic calendar before holding positions open through those events.

Risk management specific to commodities

Beyond the usual stop and position size, keep in mind that gold and silver can have larger price gaps than stocks or common currency pairs on days of major news, which can occasionally cause the stop to be executed at a worse price than planned. Because of that, trading with an even smaller risk per trade on these assets — and avoiding opening a position minutes before a major economic release — is a common practice among those who've already been caught by this kind of move.

Trading precious metals on a platform like Astron lets you track these quotes and apply the same technical analysis discipline and risk management used in other markets. What changes is the set of fundamental factors behind the price — and knowing that background is what separates someone who understands the reason for the move from someone who's just reacting to the color of the candle.