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By Manuel Tellechea, CMT

Global Futures Heatmap: 2025 Is a Historic Year for Metals

The annual performance heatmap reveals sharp contrasts across asset classes, with metals standing out clearly as the absolute winners of the year.

Metals: The Clear Leaders of 2025

Precious and base metals dominate the top of the rankings:

• Silver +74.73% → the year’s top performer.
• Gold +50.64% → broad bullish cycle confirmed.
• Platinum +65.68%, Palladium +46.28%, Copper +21.54%.

Chart 1: MAPS

The metals complex is exhibiting its strongest collective performance in more than a decade, supported by:

• flight-to-quality flows,
• the narrative of structural inflation,
• industrial and technological demand,
• USD weakness.

This leadership aligns with the technical breakouts identified in gold, silver, and aluminum.

Silver Breaks Out: A Long-Term Structural Move Unfolding

Silver is entering one of its most important technical phases of the past decade. After years of consolidation, the market has broken through key levels that historically have preceded explosive bullish cycles.

This is a major technical event:

• The last time SLV broke a comparable resistance level (2009–2010), the price multiplied by 4.17× (+417%) in less than two years.
• Even the most recent partial rally (2022–2024) delivered a +214% advance.
• The current breakout has pushed the price above $51, establishing a new cycle high and confirming a rounded base pattern nearly a decade in the making.

Chart 2 $SLV

In classical technical analysis, such a broad base typically precedes long, accelerated trending moves.

Chart 3: SEASONALS

A strong seasonal pattern supports the current rally

In the seasonal (multi-year overlay) chart, 2025 clearly stands out from the rest of the years analyzed:

• 2025 is among the strongest years since 2010, with a trajectory that mirrors prior large-scale rallies.
• Years such as 2010 and 2020 — both marked by major structural breakouts — serve as relevant references, and 2025 is approaching those performance ranges.
• Silver typically strengthens its momentum between September and December, a pattern that is also showing up this year.

Overall, seasonality suggests that the current behavior is not an outlier, but rather part of an expansion phase that often develops ahead of major breakouts.

Palladium Futures: A Trend Reversal After Three Years of a Bear Market?

The weekly palladium chart suggests the metal may finally be emerging from the deep correction that began after the 2022 all-time high. The current rebound is meaningful: price is reclaiming zones that served as critical support for more than a decade.

First meaningful higher-high since 2021

Palladium has just printed its first significant higher-high since the post-2022 collapse.

This implies:

• a potential shift in price structure,
• a transition from a bear market into an accumulation phase,
• an increasing probability of a new bullish regime if current levels hold.

The move also aligns with the broader momentum across the metals complex:

• silver, gold, platinum, and aluminum are all breaking long-term structures,
• the USD is weakening,
• and supply pressures are emerging across industrial metals and PGM (platinum group metals).

Chart 4 Palladium Futures

Platinum’s strong recovery (+65% YTD) further supports palladium’s turn, given the partial substitution between both metals in industrial applications.

However, palladium remains the precious metal with the tightest fundamental balance in the market. While the narrative that “EVs will kill palladium” dominated 2022–2024 and drove the metal to five-year lows, the reality in 2025–2026 shows a predominantly positive sentiment in the short term, supported by the sharp price rebound in 2025 (+40–52% YTD) and expectations of persistent supply deficits. Still, caution appears in long-term views due to the ongoing transition toward electric vehicles and the possibility of future supply surpluses.

Conclusion: Positive or Negative?

Overall positive, especially in the short term (1–6 months):

YTD recovery, supply deficits, and resilient hybrid-vehicle demand support enthusiasm. The consensus points to a sustained rebound, with targets above $1,500/oz.

Long-term risk remains:

If EV adoption accelerates (+20% annually) or supply surpluses emerge, the metal could turn bearish again, with downside targets near $1,000/oz.

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