Friday, 1/30/2026, was a day of reckoning for the price of silver. As of 2:30PM CT, the price of silver had fallen approximately 27%. Yet, it still had year-to-date gains of 17% due to the strength of its rally. This rally had driven intense interest into silver ETFs, specifically the ProShares Ultrashort Silver ETF (ZSL). ZSL is an ETF that aims for results that are 200% the inverse of the Bloomberg Silver Subindex.
ZSL had an average of 805.91 million shares traded over the past five trading days (1/26/2026 to 1/30/2026). In fact, it has been the top traded ETF on U.S. exchanges each day from 1/26/2026 through 1/30/2026. The only trading day of 2026 in which ZSL was not among the top-three most traded ETFs was the first market day of the year, 1/2/2026, when it finished fourth with a volume of 122.66 million shares.
The iShares Silver Trust (SLV), which is the silver ETF with the most assets under management, had an average daily volume of 308.28 million shares over this same five-day period. That is over quadruple the volume of the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY), which is consistently the most liquid ETF.
To further illustrate how extreme and novel the recent trade volume levels of the ZSL ETF has been, we created an index for each of the silver ETFs. This index comes from calculating the average daily trade volume for each ETF from 2020 to 2024, and then we set that equal to 100, allowing insight into the current surge relative to the past.
Each of the four non-bearish silver ETFs had trading volume on 1/30/2026 between 1,899% and 3,286% greater than its 2020 to 2024 baseline. However, this is dwarfed by the 753,019% increase in trade volume for ZSL relative to its baseline.
There are many logical reasons why this increased volume could be driven by institutional forces, but there is nothing that the newer generation of retail investors love more than a market trend mixed with some leverage.
There has been an uptick in the number of posts discussing silver or silver ETFs across investment- and stock-related subreddits over the past week. Yet, it is not as significant as the surge during the GameStop Mania of 2021.
The Google Search Interest for terms related to silver increased throughout 2025, but they have started to diverge recently. The four-week moving average for “silver ETFs” decreased to 56.50 for the week starting 1/25/2026. This is the second consecutive week of a decrease after peaking at 77.00. The moving average of interest for “silver price” and “silver” have continued upward, and were at 71.50 and 83.50 respectively.
Whether or not the price of silver continues its downward plunge or stabilizes over the next few days, volume and interest regarding the pearly metal are likely to stay elevated.
