Silver Breaks Out -- Here Are Your Targets

Silver is breaking out to the upside, after 11 weeks of consolidation in a rectangle bottom. The main mover for both silver and gold -- which is also up strongly today -- is Chinese trade data. 

Reuters reports: The value of China's total exports climbed 10.6 percent in January from a year earlier, the Customs Administration said on Wednesday, more than five times market forecasts for a 2 percent rise.

That was a couple days ago. But silver is starting to get good press. And apparently that jolted the sleeping giant that is Wall Street into action today.

I've been saying for some time that the center of gravity for precious metals has moved from West to East.  What happens in China is much more important for both gold and silver nowadays than what happens in New York.

Here, I've created a daily chart of the iShares Silver Trust (SLV) with a "volume by price" overlay to give you some targets ...

(Updated chart)

That little smudge on the far right side that I've put a yellow circle around -- that's silver's price action today. Since it is breaking out, we might expect it to keep rallying until people start to sell it (duh). And that's more likely to happen at levels where more of it was bought or sold. Volume by price -- the gray/pink bars going across the chart -- show us just that.

So the next overhead resistance comes at 21.50. That's where a lot of silver was bought, but even more was sold. aFter that comes 22.55. And after that, we'll see if silver can get over its previous two highs, just under $24. 

What if silver gets above $24?  Then I'd really only look to the technical level of the low silver made at 25.17 before it collapsed.

Above that, the next place where silver saw a lot of buying and selling was around $30.40.

You could choose other support and resistance for silver using, say, Fibonacci levels. I'm just using this chart to present some ideas. In any case, silver looks pretty bullish from a technical standpoint.