From Silver Euphoria To Silver Faceplant

Earlier this week, I wrote about taking partial profits on our silver trade — not because I had a crystal ball on where the metal was going next, but because our process said, “you’ve got a triple, take half.”

⚡️Taking Profits On Silver

Not calling a top, but following our process. $SVM $SLV https://t.co/F4JOsfLdoC
— Portfolio Armor (@PortfolioArmor) January 26, 2026

That was the whole point of that piece: position sizing, structure, and pre-set exits matter more than bravado about “calling the top.”

Today we saw the other side of that coin.

Silver puked ~15% intraday, its worst one-day drop in well over a decade. (Coinpaper)
Gold got hit for ~7–8%, its biggest slide since the 2013 taper-tantrum era. (Bloomberg)
Copper, the “real economy” metal, dropped around 4% after screaming to record highs yesterday. (FA Magazine)

Equities? Down maybe 1%. Dollar? Up a few tenths of a percent. In other words: a proper metals bloodbath while stocks mostly shrugged.

Commodities veteran Alexander Campbell summed it up on X:

silver down 15%

gold down 7%

copper down 4%

stocks down 1%

dollar up 40bps https://t.co/r6DA7CWp4b pic.twitter.com/Q5NNe9ss0w
— Campbell (@abcampbell) January 30, 2026

My reply was simple:

It pays to have a process that automatically takes profits.

It pays to have a process that automatically takes profits. https://t.co/zdVEuQ1UjC
— David Pinsen (@dpinsen) January 30, 2026

Today was the test.

What Just Happened To Metals?

You don’t need a conspiracy theory to explain a move like this. The setup was already stretched:

Gold and silver had ripped to all-time highs on a mix of dollar weakness, geopolitics, and FOMO. (Bloomberg)
Copper had just printed its biggest intraday jump since 2008. (FA Magazine)
Positioning in the futures and options markets was crowded long, with systematic flows piling in as price and momentum kept reinforcing each other. (The Economic Times)

Then you got the catalyst:

A sharp dollar rebound as markets priced in a more hawkish Fed chair choice (the “Warsh effect”), flipping the macro script that had been fueling the melt-up. (Bloomberg)

When you’ve got vertical charts, maxed-out positioning, and then the macro backdrop abruptly flips, you don’t get a gentle pullback, you get an air pocket. Margin calls, systematic de-risking, and anyone who “just had to be long metals” suddenly discovering they can also be long regret.

How Our Process Handled Today’s Flush

Here’s where the boring part — the part nobody wants to talk about when everything is going straight up — actually matters.

In the last several days before today’s flush, we:

Took partial profits on Silvercorp Metals (SVM) calls — locking in a triple-digit gain on half, and letting the rest ride as a “free swing.”
Logged exits on Sibanye-Stillwater (SBSW), Freeport-McMoRan (FCX), and Gold Fields (GFI) option structures as they hit our pre-set targets.

You can see those exits below:

Calls on Silvercorp Metals (SVM 0.62%↑). Bought for $2.04 per contract on 12/10/2025 as part of a 3-leg combo; sold half for $6.90 on 1/26/2026. Profit: 238% (taking into account the put spread financing, which we normally do after exiting the full position, our profit here was 360%)
3-leg combo on Freeport-McMoRan (FCX -2.19%↓). Entered at a net debit of $3.20 on 10/10/2025; exited the $45/$40 put spread at a net debit of $3.49 on 10/24/2025, sold the first half of the December 18th, 2026 $50 calls at $10.05 on 12/26/2025, and sold the second half of the December 18th, 2026 $50 calls at $22.00 on 1/29/2026. Profit: 292% on premium outlay (111% of max risk).
3-leg combo on Sibanye Stillwater (SBSW -1.48%↓). Entered for a net debit of $1.85 per contract on 10/20/2025. Exited the Nov 21, 2025 $10/$8 put spread for net debits of $0.15 on 10/29/2025 and $0.15 on 11/10/2025, and sold the Apr 17, 2026 $12 calls for $6.40 on 1/22/2026 and $8.70 on 1/26/2026, for a net value of $7.40 per contract. Profit: 300% on premium outlay (144% of max risk).
4-leg combo on Gold Fields (GFI -3.47%↓). Entered at a net debit of $1.15 on 10/28/2025; exited the March 20th, 2026 $35/$30 put spread at a net debit of $0.20 on 1/21/2026 and the April 17th, 2026 $40/$50 call spread at a net credit of $8.00 on 1/28/2026. Profit: 578% on premium outlay (108% of max risk).

The key point is how those exits happened:

They weren’t discretionary “I’ve got a bad feeling about this” sells.
They weren’t top-ticks that require us to pretend we nailed the exact high.
They were mechanical: when calls roughly triple, scale out of half; when a put spread decays to our target, close it and free up risk budget; when a vertical hits most of its width, ring the register.

So when metals imploded today, we weren’t scrambling to decide whether to sell everything or “diamond hand” the drawdown.

We’d already:

Recovered initial risk on multiple trades.
Banked realized gains in the silver, gold, and copper complex.
Left ourselves with smaller, asymmetric upside tails instead of oversized, fragile exposure.

That’s what I meant by “a process that automatically takes profits.”

Why Trend Days Don’t Change The Playbook

A big down day like this tempts people into two equal and opposite mistakes:

Declare the top is in, swear off metals, and chase whatever’s green.
Insist this is “just noise,” double down, and ignore risk entirely.

Our framework avoids both:

We entered metals trades because the macro, technicals, and our ranking system aligned.
We sized them so a melt-up would matter, but a crash wouldn’t kill us.
We pre-defined exits on both the upside (scale-out targets) and downside (put-spread floors, structure risk caps).

When the upside played out, we didn’t pretend to know the future — we just harvested. When the downdraft finally came, it hit mark-to-market, not our already-banked P&L.

And crucially: because we’re systematically hedged and structured, we’re still in a position to buy again if the next setup comes along at much better prices.

The Real Lesson Of Today’s Metals Crash

Since you read financial media, you already know narratives are cheap:

Yesterday: “Metals are in a secular breakout, fiat is doomed.”
Today: “This is the end of the mania, the bubble burst, etc.”

Both can be true at different time scales. Silver can be in a long-term bull and still drop 15% in a day. Gold can be repricing a broken fiat regime and still nuke 7% when the dollar rips. Copper can be an AI/datacenter/reindustrialization bottleneck and still overshoot on the upside and the downside.

What doesn’t change with the news cycle is whether you run a process.

Our process looks like this:

Use a ranking system (Portfolio Armor’s) to identify asymmetric names and structures.
Express views with options layouts that:
- Lower the net cost of upside.
- Define downside in dollars, not vibes.
Pre-set exits on both:
- Calls (scale out around 3× cost; let a runner chase the parabolic bit).
- Put spreads (buy back cheap and re-deploy risk elsewhere).
Let the structures do the work instead of your adrenal glands.

That’s why a day like today is okay for us.

Where We Stand After The Flush

After today’s metal massacre:

We’ve already crystallized gains in SVM, SBSW, FCX, and GFI over the last few sessions.
We still have exposure in some of these themes via runners and other names—but it’s leaner, cheaper, and mostly house money at risk.
Our risk budget is cleaner now than it was before the selloff, which means if the market offers us distressed pricing in structurally good names, we can step in without flinching.

If metals stabilize and grind higher from here, our remaining upside will still participate.

If the flush continues and takes out weak hands, we’ll be looking to rotate some of the profits we took before the crash into new, properly structured trades at better levels—instead of selling the bottom or pretending nothing happened.

That’s what “it pays to have a process” actually means in practice.

If you want to see the nuts and bolts of how we structure those trades — the exact options combos we used on names like Silvercorp, Sibanye-Stillwater, Freeport, and Gold Fields—you’ll find them in my trade alerts and weekly exits posts. Here, the takeaway is simpler:

Big one-day moves make headlines.
Quiet, systematic profit-taking makes compounders.

We’re far more interested in the second one.

If you want a heads up when we place our next trade, feel free to subscribe to the Portfolio Armor Substack below.

And if you want to hedge your metal names next time they spike, consider our hedging app.

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