Hello and welcome back to CantosCharts. I'm David Jones from spread betting company IG Index.

Today I thought we'd take a look at what has been something of a strange market over the last couple of months and that's the price of silver.

The obvious one to look at with everything that is going on in the world at the moment is gold and we know that gold just regularly sets all-time highs. But we've seen silver come back to life a little bit over the last couple of weeks. I thought we'd start off, just to put it in perspective, we'll look at the long-term picture for silver going back about three years.

There is a clear uptrend for silver. Earlier this year it raced as high as around about $50 an ounce, then we saw some significant changes, but the main one being the exchange where silver trades, I think the CME, jacked up margin rates. They put rates up several times over the course of a couple of weeks and it meant that initial margin requirements jumped up by around about 80%. This flushed out loads of short-term speculators for silver and we saw this enormous correction where it went from $50 down to around about $33 in the space of a couple of weeks. So there were plenty of people who unfortunately would have got their fingers burnt in silver only a couple of months ago.

That doesn't change the longer term trend for silver, but again, it's maybe not too relevant at the moment where we're trading now because that longer term trend line comes in around about $22 an ounce and silver is almost double that.

Over the last couple of months, following this massive volatility in April, beginning of April I think it was, we've seen the odd rally in silver, but again I think because of maybe the memories from when we saw this incredible volatility, they've proved to be unsustainable, so we've seen some fairly range-bound trading from silver.

But this has all changed in the last week or so. We had seen around about $38 to $40 cap the price of silver, but it's managed to break out of this trading range in the last week.

So if we look on the hourly charts we'll see this is silver now going back to the beginning of July and we've got a definite trend, albeit short-term, that's been in place for a couple of weeks now.

So I think maybe we've seen silver shake off some of the nerves that has sort of plagued it in recent months and we'll see more of a sustainable recovery in silver. It may be back as high as those $50 highs from earlier this year, but at the moment, looking at it here, we've seen some fairly solid support on the short-term charts come out from the $37.50 to $38 area on silver.

So at the moment any weakness back to there looks like a buying opportunity, buying into this recovery trend, and I think it's only if we start to slip below $37.50 does it start to look like this is a false breakout. But after being fairly boring and range-bound in previous months, I think silver is starting to have a bit of a shine again and we may see further gains yet to come for this one in the weeks ahead.

That's it for me on CantosCharts. You can follow me on Twitter for market updates throughout the day and I'm DavidJones_ig.