Silver is not small gold
The correlation with gold is high and the beta is not one: silver typically moves further, in both directions, on the same macro impulse. Combined with a thinner book, that produces the behaviour silver traders complain about most — sharp excursions beyond obvious levels that immediately reverse.
In other words, silver runs stops. Whether that's a hazard or the setup depends entirely on your rules, and it's precisely what the liquidity sweep detector exists to count. Turn it on and log a few hundred sweeps of the prior day's high and low before you form an opinion.
The two things a silver backtest must control for
Session. Silver's Asian session is genuinely thin, and thin means gappy, unrepresentative price action. A backtest that mixes Asian-session setups into a London/New York sample will report a worse strategy than you actually have, or a better one, depending on luck — either way it is measuring the feed as much as the market.
Stop size. Silver's typical excursion means a stop sized like a gold stop gets hit far more often. Run each logged trade through the position size calculator at silver's own contract terms, or the R values in your journal will be fiction.
Backtesting silver in CRTLAB
Open XAGUSD, step forward candle by candle, and log every setup your rules would take. The whole archive is open from the first chart — which for a metal this regime-driven is the only way a test means anything, because silver in a quiet range and silver in a squeeze are two different instruments. What you spend is candles: 10,000 free sample first, or unlimited at $14.99 a month.
The obvious companion test is the same rules on gold. Same engine, same log format, two very different sets of numbers — and the comparison usually decides which of the two you should actually be trading.
Frequently asked questions
Can I backtest silver for free?
CRTLAB is free to try. You get XAGUSD across the full archive, with every tool the product has, for your first 10,000 candles of replay — roughly two hours of stepping through a chart, no card needed. After the sample, unlimited replay is $14.99 a month, cancel any time. Silver moves about twice as hard as gold for the same news, so a stop distance carried over from a gold test is usually the first thing a silver backtest disproves.
Why do my silver backtests look worse than my gold ones?
Usually stop size and session. Silver's typical excursion is larger, so a gold-sized stop is hit more often, and its Asian session is thin enough to distort a sample that includes it. Split your log by session and re-size, and the two usually converge.
Does the data include the thin Asian session?
Yes — the feed is real, which means genuinely quiet periods look quiet rather than being smoothed over. That is the honest representation, and it's why splitting a silver backtest by session matters so much.
What timeframe suits silver?
Test yours, but be aware that silver's excursion behaviour is most visible on 5–15 minute charts, where the sweeps and immediate reversals are large relative to a normal stop.