Silver jumped sharply after a new wave of threats from Iran in the Strait of Hormuz, while Brent crude also rose on concerns over possible supply disruptions. A breakthrough in the auto industry — NVIDIA opened commercial access to the powerful Alpamayo 2 Super model for autonomous driving — could accelerate AI adoption in transport and affect tech stock prices. A wave of downgrades to Apple's ratings amid rising memory-chip costs is calling profitability into question even amid strong device demand. All of these events increase volatility and create both opportunities and risks for traders and investors, requiring careful strategy and position management.
Silver rose sharply — more than 3% — to around $59.50 per ounce. The move was triggered by a deterioration in the US-Iran confrontation around the Strait of Hormuz, which has once again driven demand for precious metals as safe havens.
Silver outpaced gold in percentage terms, reflecting its greater price elasticity: in times of geopolitical tension the metal serves as both a precious and an industrial commodity.
The rally was prompted by hardline rhetoric from Major General Mohsen Rezaei — senior advisor to Iran's Supreme Leader and a former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Rezaei warned that Iran will not allow the creation of an "unauthorised route" through the Strait of Hormuz and said US ships could face "serious consequences" if they try to force it. That statement went beyond a diplomatic rejection and amounted to a direct threat of military confrontation.
The warning came after President Trump described his latest offer to Tehran as a "last chance" to strike a deal, while Iran denied that any talks — ongoing or planned — were taking place.
US Central Command reported that it has redirected 44 commercial vessels, disabled two and boarded another two as part of an ongoing naval blockade, highlighting the operational risks in the strait, through which roughly a fifth of global oil transit historically passes.
According to Trading Economics, on 4 August, silver rose to $59.42, gaining 3% from the previous session. Yahoo Finance reported the metal reached $59.50 in the morning session, while the spot price at the start of the Asian session was $58.88.
The price rise reflects silver's dual nature. On the one hand, as a precious metal, silver benefits alongside gold from an inflow of "defensive" investment during geopolitical tensions. On the other hand, as an industrial input used in solar panels, electronics and EVs, it is sensitive to changes in forecasts for global economic growth. Analysts surveyed by Reuters expect an average silver price of about $71.90 per ounce in 2026, while UBS forecasts a recovery to $65 by September.
The current situation creates trading opportunities: volatility and price moves in silver can support short-term and medium-term strategies. It is important to consider the risks and have a clear position-management plan, since geopolitical news can quickly change the picture.
Instruments mentioned in the article are available for trading on the InstaSpot platform, so users may consider opening a trading account and downloading the company's mobile app to react swiftly to market changes.
Brent crude jumped sharply on Tuesday, 4 August, after a fresh spike in geopolitical tension around the Strait of Hormuz raised fears of supply disruptions along this key oil corridor. Prices rose following reports of intensified military confrontation in the strait, which historically carries about one-fifth of global crude shipments.
The Strait of Hormuz has been the focal point of oil?market volatility throughout 2026 following the start of the US-Iran conflict in late February. At the peak, a de facto closure of the strait halted shipments of up to 14 million barrels per day — an interruption the International Energy Agency called the largest in history.
Although a June truce briefly reopened navigation, a US naval blockade introduced in mid-July and renewed strikes on Iran have triggered a renewed price surge.
At the end of July, futures on Brent closed at $90.12 per barrel after reports that Iran was forcing tankers to turn back. Month?on?month prices registered their biggest gain since March. Renewed early-August disruptions have heightened fears over constrained physical supplies: traders are pricing in a risk premium for immediate delivery.
The IEA reported in July that global oil supply still stood 9.4 million b/d below pre-crisis levels despite a 4.1 million b/d recovery in June when the strait was briefly open. The agency warned that a new escalation "could overturn the forecast that the market will move into surplus next year."
CNBC reports that global oil demand is expected to fall year-on-year in 2026 for the first time since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic — a drop of 1 million b/d — as the war significantly hit output and trade flows.
JP Morgan forecasts Brent will average $86/b in Q3 2026, a level consistent with current trading ranges amid persistent supply concerns.
Traders can exploit the situation: volatility creates opportunities for short-term trades, hedging and arbitrage strategies. However, the high risks require adequate risk-management tools.
NVIDIA on Tuesday opened commercial access to Alpamayo 2 Super — a 34?billion?parameter reasoning model designed for autonomous vehicles — under the OpenMDW?1.1 license from the Linux Foundation.
The release lifts licensing restrictions that previously limited the Alpamayo model family to research use only, allowing automakers, robotaxi operators, and suppliers to deploy the technology in production without additional permission from NVIDIA.
The model, which NVIDIA calls the most in?demand open reasoning family for autonomous driving on Hugging Face — with more than 500,000 downloads — combines a 32-billion-parameter language-vision backbone built on Cosmos 3 Super Reasoner with a 2-billion-parameter diffusion?based action decoder.
Alpamayo 2 Super is intended as a developer tool rather than software to directly control vehicles. It functions as a "teacher model" in cloud workflows: generating chains of reasoning, synthetic training data and motion trajectories that can then be distilled into smaller models optimized for embedded automotive hardware such as NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Thor.
For each driving scenario, the model produces five interrelated outputs: – a planned trajectory, – a chain of causal reasoning explaining the decision, – a high-level meta-action (for example, yield or change lane), – automatically generated reasoning labels for training data, – answers to visual questions tied to specific regions in camera images.
This consolidates capabilities that previously required maintaining separate models at each stage of the development workflow.
NVIDIA says the model scores 79.2 on the LingoQA benchmark for visual question answering, ranking first among nearly 40 evaluated models. It outperforms Qwen2.5-VL (72B) by 17 points, Gemini 2.5 Pro by 15.1 points, and GPT-4o by 23.2 points.
The Alpamayo family debuted at CES 2026 in January, when CEO Jensen Huang introduced the original 10-billion-parameter model, positioned as the industry's first chain-of-thought reasoning model for autonomous?driving research. Alpamayo 2 Super was announced at GTC Taipei on 31 May, with commercial availability slated for summer 2026.
The model targets so-called long-tail events — rare and complex road scenarios such as workers directing traffic at construction sites, atypical emergency-services behaviour, or foreign objects on the roadway — which conventional perception systems struggle to handle.
NVIDIA's chains of causation integrate with Halos safety-validation workflows to meet ISO/PAS 8800 — the safety standard for AI systems in road vehicles.
For traders, this is a signal: news of commercial availability, impressive benchmark results and industrial deployment could affect NVIDIA's shares and those of related IT/autonomy companies. That creates trading opportunities on volatile market moves, but remember to manage risks according to your trading strategy.
Apple shares came under pressure on Tuesday after a wave of analyst downgrades: Wall Street analysts warned that rising memory-chip prices will continue to squeeze the company's margins despite strong consumer demand.
Phillip Capital cut Apple to "reduce" from "neutral," keeping its price target at $290 — below the recent close. Analyst Helena Wang noted that despite ongoing demand for the iPhone 17 and MacBook, the sharp rise in memory costs offsets that positive momentum.
"Memory price inflation is becoming a serious margin pressure factor," Wang wrote, stressing that the DRAM market is controlled by only three suppliers, leaving Apple "minimal flexibility in sourcing."
DZ Bank also downgraded Apple to "hold" from "buy," setting a $310 target and citing rising memory costs and supply chain constraints. China Renaissance likewise cut to "hold" from "buy" with a $280 target after Apple's guidance for Q4 disappointed expectations.
The downgrades followed Apple's report last week of record Q3 results that beat revenue and EPS expectations on strong iPhone and Mac demand. However, the company issued weak near?term guidance due to the global chip shortage, triggering an almost 10% drop in the stock after the report on Thursday.
Apple has already raised prices on iPad and several Mac models in response to higher component costs, and some analysts expect iPhone prices to rise next. The memory shortage — dubbed "RAM-geddon" on Wall Street — is driven by a surge in demand for AI-capable devices that require significantly more DRAM and NAND flash.
For traders, this translates into trading opportunities: heightened volatility offers chances for short-term strategies, hedging or trading downside.
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