I've only been a student of silver for a short time... keeping that in mind, it does appear that, as SethArb pointed out, Monday, April 27, 1987 was the sharpest one-day sell-off within the last 20 years, in absolute price terms. (Not if we go back to the excesses of 1979-81, of course.) Almost exactly 19 years ago today... still months away from Black Friday, the Oct. 19th stock market crash. Here's a chart of that year, from tradingcharts.com:
Here I've zoomed in on the period of interest:
We can observe (this is really for my own benefit, since the charts obviously speak for themselves, loud and clear):
- a parabolic rise from sub-$6 to nearly $10, culminating on Friday, 4/24/87.
- a ~70-cent gap down, then major sell-off on Monday, 4/27, to as low as $7.20, and "closing" around $7.75. Was that the price at which trading was halted for the day?
- the next day, Tuesday, 4/28, we had a 25-cent gap up at the open to $8, subsequently closed; ended the day down around $7.60, but failed to set new lows.
- followed by 3 weeks of an uptrend to nearly the high, completing a 1-2-3 pattern, and finally (almost) closing that original 4/27 gap down.
- price then came down and settled into a slightly descending channel for the rest of that year.
We'll see soon enough to what extent history repeats itself. Obviosly, in 1987 we didn't have a gazillion of online small speculators, playing the Hunt Brothers on their mighty, sub-$500 PCs...