There’s a pattern that has repeated itself across every financial market, every decade, every generation of investors.
Back in 1637, when a single tulip bulb traded for more than a skilled craftsman’s annual salary.
During the dot-com bubble, when companies with no revenue and no business model commanded billion-dollar valuations simply because they had “.com” in their name.
I saw the same thing when a jpeg image of a cartoon ape sold for $3.4 million.
The trigger changes. The asset class changes. Human behaviour doesn’t, even when there is an ocean of information available now.
And there is only one reason why: Fear Of Missing Out! A.k.a. FOMO
But why am I talking about this suddenly?
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Let Me Give You Some Background
First In December 2024, we wrote about silver. It was trading at ₹85,000/kg. I said “Silver may be having its golden moment.”
The thesis was simple: demand had been outpacing supply for years. Industrial use, solar panels, EVs, electronics, had surged 55% between 2015 and 2024. Total demand was up 14%. Supply was constrained. The fundamentals were there.
But at that time silver wasn’t being talked about much elsewhere. It barely made the news. It stayed rangebound until July 2025, and then it began to move.
Increasing global uncertainty and chatter about silver shortages started floating around.
As a result, Silver rose by 50% by Diwali and then corrected a little.
Since then, we saw an extraordinary rally in Silver where it touched ₹4.2 lakh at its peak in January 2026 (almost doubling from its Diwali highs). A 270% rise in 13 months.
During this rally, I watched the one predictable investor behavior that ultimately hurts their wealth.
📊 Question: In 1979-1980, silver prices surged 700% before crashing. Who was behind the attempted market corner?
A) The Rothschild family
B) The Hunt Brothers
C) George Soros
D) Warren Buffett
Fear of Missing Out
As silver’s price rose, so did the hype around it.
WhatsApp forwards on why silver is a must have in your portfolio. YouTube videos with confident presenters pointing at charts.
Suddenly, everyone had a thesis and everywhere there was chatter about silver
And as silver crashed, people stopped talking about it. No more media coverage. No more discussion on gold & silver.
The pattern is always the same: Rising prices → More talk → More FOMO → More volume → Peak → Silence.
This is what we saw on our platform as well. Investments in silver spiked as prices rose and as they corrected, the volumes normalised.
And I’m sure a similar pattern played out across other platforms and in other hyped products.
We saw this with crypto in 2021. Small caps in 2017 and 2024. And so on.
So, this story isn’t just about silver.
Because the asset changes. The story and human behaviour doesn’t.
What Can We Even Do About It?
The easy answer: FOMO is the most human emotion of all. Despite the plethora of information, intelligence, and evolution, this pattern keeps repeating.
There’s no universal antidote to this. But you can avoid falling into this trap, or at least minimise the damage, by practicing a few fundamental things:
- Be countercyclical. When everyone is shouting, pause. Euphoria is rarely the beginning of the move, it’s usually towards the end.
- Stick to your plan. Create your asset allocation according to your goals and stick to it with maybe small deviations.
- Discipline through SIP. Small, consistent investing reduces the temptation to “go all in” at the top. It replaces emotion with process.
Because in markets, you don’t win by being the fastest. You win by being the most consistent.
The crowd will always find the next silver.
Your job is simply to not be in the crowd when it does.
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Till the next time,
Vijay
CEO – InCred Money
P.S. I share my thoughts on Investing and the Economy regularly. You can follow me here.
