Last night we saw silver futures fall from a high of 48.19 all the way down to 42.20… a move of –12.42% in a one hour’s time. Talk about a flash crash.  Reasons varied between exchange margin hikes last week and MF Global margin hike Friday night.

And now here we are just 20 hours later we see Silver having recouped more than half of that loss, before falling back down (and was within a dollar of recouping all of it). This sort of insane volatility is why these things are better left to the professionals to trade, in our opinion.

A retail futures trader deciding to dip her foot in the water on Friday afternoon by buying just a single Silver futures contract would have seen the following P/L over just a few short hours (down $30K at one point – which is no doubt why MF Global wants their clients to have a little over $25K in their accounts to trade the volatile metal).

This type of activity is definitely not for the faint of heart (nor those with just $25,000 in an account, in our opinion), leading Silver to become the new poster child for commodity volatility, taking the reins from the formerly high flying Natural Gas futures, which have become downright boring in comparison.