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By Bill McConnell

December 30, 2025 — 9.56am

Bulls N’ Bears Dollar Bill reckons any “I told you so” column is a dangerous path to tread. It tempts fate, offends modesty, and invites the gods to short your next position. But sometimes, in a rank display of self-indulgence, Dollar Bill likes to glance at the scoreboard. After all, a record’s a record and for the past few years Dollar Bill’s been humming the market tune at least a bar or two ahead of the band. And now, there’s a bit more to add, particularly with nickel and lithium starting to daylight on the horizon.

Three calls and three hits for Dollar Bill - what’s next?

Back in the gloom of 2022, when the word uranium still cleared a room faster than a margin call, Dollar Bill was whispering heresy. The world wanted clean energy, net zero and absolution. And yet, there sat uranium, glowing quietly in the corner, waiting to be forgiven for its accidental sins of the past. With “small modular reactors” or “SMR’s” starting to get the attention of the energy glitterati around the world, Dollar Bill wrote at the time, “uranium promises to become one of the stars of the show”. And sure enough, the pariah metal became the comeback kid, marching from the scrapheap to the centrepiece of the energy transition.

Uranium prices subsequently doubled in the next two years, peaking around US$110 a pound. Prices have taken a little breather since, but are still trading above US$80 a pound. Uranium remains a thing and Dollar Bill wouldn’t bet against another price revival in the next couple of years.

Then came silver. It was gold’s overlooked understudy that refused to stay in the wings. In May last year – more than 18 month ago - while gold was stealing the spotlight and copper was flexing in its redemption arc prior to its short-lived July 2025 correction, Dollar Bill tapped out a column headlined “A Silver Linings Playbook”. That piece laid out the argument that silver, not gold, was the real modern metal and the one to watch – part precious, part practical and these days, indispensable to everything from solar panels to circuit boards.

Eighteen months on, that call couldn’t have been more prescient. In the time since, silver has more than quietly stolen a march on its shinier golden cousin with demand fuelled by a global hunger for electricity, efficiency and all things renewable. In fact, over the past year, spot silver has more than doubled the returns paid by gold, peaking above US$83 an ounce just this week before an afternoon sell off yesterday saw it give back about US$10 an ounce. But despite that one-day price slump silver is still up an incredible 180 per cent in the past year. In comparison, spot gold, which is still on a glittering tear, has managed only a miserly 73 per cent hike in the same time. While the headlines still scream gold and for good reason, silver has massively outperformed, driven by industrial demand trumping central-bank fear.