Recently in the investment circle, silver has once again become a hot topic. The underlying logic is actually very straightforward—whenever market liquidity is loose and people fear currency devaluation, these traditional safe-haven assets are repackaged, rebranded, and then make a dazzling comeback.

But here’s a cold hard fact worth digging into.

In the past 50 years, truly significant bull runs in silver have only occurred twice. And the outcome of these two rallies? Without exception, they ended in tragedies where investors lost everything.

**The first story happened in 1980**

The background was a crisis of confidence in the US dollar and runaway global inflation. In such a market environment, silver prices soared from $2 to $50, an increase of over 20 times. Sounds a bit like the crazy crypto assets of that time, doesn’t it?

The main players were the Hunt brothers—a group of wealthy individuals attempting to monopolize the global silver market and challenge the entire financial system. They used heavy leverage, were overconfident, and believed they had cracked the code to wealth.

Then the market taught them a lesson. The exchanges suddenly changed the rules, forced liquidation, and liquidity evaporated instantly. Silver was halved in a single day, countless fortunes vanished, leaving behind a cautionary tale of chaos.

It was then that people realized: in financial markets, you’re never fighting against a specific opponent, but against the system’s own rules.

**The second story happened in 2011**

This time, the background was the era of quantitative easing after the global financial crisis. Silver was packaged as the "poor man’s gold" and the "inflation hedge," pushed to the heights by capital stories.

Retail investors flooded in, pushing the price from $9 to $50. Everyone in the square was shouting "This time is really different"—every bubble starts with such a chorus.

And then? The bubble burst. Prices halved again, followed by a long, decade-long decline. Many who held on with "long-term faith" were silently buried in losses.

**The deadly common point of these two bull markets**

A careful look reveals they made the same mistake: the market capacity was too small, yet it was flooded with surging emotional waves; investors over-leveraged, concentrating risk in a limited liquidity pool; when everyone believed the same story, that story was already nearing its end.

Silver is like a cup with limited capacity. When a huge flood of capital rushes in, the result can only be splashes that eventually lead to a complete collapse.

This is not to deny the value of silver, but to remind a market law: emotion-driven asset prices will ultimately revert to fundamentals. Assets that seem "ancient and stable" can become the biggest risk traps once overhyped.

For any investor, what should be learned from history is not the timing to chase the rally, but the ability to identify bubbles and control risks.