Gold and silver futures plummeted on Tuesday. Silver fell after the Chicago Mercantile Exchange CME increased margin requirements for metal futures. Recall that over the past few days, the value of silver has been growing rapidly.

CME Group announced that starting February 2, it will increase the margin requirements when trading silver futures by 18% - from $14,000 per contract to $16,500. From now on, traders will have to provide more collateral to open a position in silver.

Experts consider this decision of the exchanges against the background of sharp price fluctuations quite predictable and argue that the fall in silver quotes is the result of these measures.

March silver futures on the COMEX exchange dropped 10.3%, to $26.402 per ounce. On the first day of this week, the most actively traded contracts for the precious metal increased by 9.3% and reported the highest since February 2013.

Commodity analysts note that silver prices began to fall actively after private traders tried to sharply contract the volume of short positions. Recently, similar actions by traders led to the soaring of the shares of GameStop Corp. and AMC Entertainment Holdings.

Fortunately, the $1.5 trillion silver market has proven to be a more challenging target for investors coordinating actions on the WallStreetBets website and the Discord messenger.

Experts believe that silver prices will shortly remain volatile, and after this week, new traders who entered the precious metals market may begin to liquidate open positions, which will entail corresponding consequences for prices. That is why, analysts say, buyers should be extremely careful.

Meanwhile, gold quotes also sank heavily. Experts say that the appreciable pressure on the quotes of silver and gold was exerted by the strengthening of the US dollar. Its breakout to the highs since December 2020 has become an obstacle to profit-taking from trades with precious metals by investors. Note that, on Tuesday, the ICE dollar index increased by 0.2%, to 91.199. During the trading session, the index rose to 91.287.

At the close of trading on Tuesday, April gold futures sank 1.6%, to $1,833.40 an ounce. On Monday, the price of the metal increased by 0.7%. March copper futures were down 0.6%, to $3.5245 per pound. April platinum futures fell 3.8%, to $ 1,096 an ounce on Tuesday, while March palladium contracts slipped 0.6% to $ 2,227.70 an ounce.