I've never had much luck with silver for some reason. Other metals I've had success with, but never silver. What is it about silver that makes it so difficult to trade?
I actually blew up in silver in 2008, and not in a small way. Instead of suicide I had a supernatural spiritual experience (not joking). It's a combo of the vol and contract size. Plus the fact that it is the most manipulated commodity traded in terms of days of production already sold forward. I'm sure an analytical study of VaR and vol would show silver to be a killer market. Stick with the options unless you have the deep pockets.
It ranges between $14 to $18. So easy to buy in low and (a long wait ) sell high or short. I seem to remember from the 1970s some rich guys tried to corner the market with massive investments. As far as I recall they came unstuck.
I believe it is more of duration of holding it, by far, it is one for the top ten markets I trade, but I will rollover for years and just wait it out. I went long Dec 2015 and have added a few times, some small losers and been able to hang on few times, just a matter of hanging on long term. I gave up long ago of day trading/scalping, do hourly based on support/resistance and daily/weekly in futures and options on monthly using other methods. Sometimes will give good spread signals on Gold/silver. Trying to find the bottom always like this of sideways patterns, whereas generally tops don't hang around same areas. Yeah, Hunt brothers tried to corner Silver market, exchanges caught on and said only selling could happen and Hunts lost billions. http://www.investopedia.com/articles/optioninvestor/09/silver-thursday-hunt-brothers.asp
Silver day range tends to be relatively small. It has quite good correlation with gold price. Generally I wouldn't trade silver. However, if I missed the gold signal, I'd trade silver.
I shorted GBP/XAG just before Brexit and made a nice profit. Other than that I've always lost money with silver. I actually thought Remain would win, but bought silver rather than making an outright bet. Ed Seykota didn't do well with silver and some of the other market wizards too...
Personally if I traded a financial instrument and I keep on loosing money, I wouldn't trade it again till there is definite change of chart pattern / fundamental. One very good example is Nikkei. It hardly move, and is hardly tradable and I haven't trade Nikkei for close to a year.
Silver has the distinction of being an industrial metal as well as a historically precious, monetary metal. This generally means that there are numerous, not just one or two, macroeconomic forces working on silver that transcend normal technical analysis. There also seems to be, from time to time, large “over-night” moves in silver that do not match a traditional non-correlation to the US Dollar. The silver futures contract has also been the subject of talk regarding price manipulation by big financial players. Indeed there was a CFTC investigation that lasted for years regarding manipulation of the silver price.