Silver, which plunged 27 percent last week, still is poised to climb to the “very important” price of $50 an ounce by the end of the year, according to technical analysis by Bank of America Merrill Lynch. “You’re still in an uptrend, despite the sharp sell-off” as shown by an intermediate-term trend from the lows on Aug. 24 and Jan. 28, Mary Ann Bartels, the head of U.S. technical and market analysis at Merrill in New York, said yesterday in a telephone interview. “The uptrend was not broken.” Last week, silver futures plunged the most since at least 1983 after the Comex exchange in New York boosted margin costs by 84 percent. The price rebounded 9.1 percent in the past two days. On April 25, the metal reached $49.845, the highest since the Hunt Brothers tried to corner the market in 1980. In that year, the commodity climbed to a record $50.35. Futures will face so-called resistance around $45 before topping $50, a “very important number” that “called the end of the bull market in commodities, with the Hunt Brothers getting squeezed out of silver” in 1980, Bartels said. The metal may rise to $80 in three to five years, she said. In February, Bartels correctly predicted the silver rally in March and April. Yesterday, silver futures for July delivery rose $1.37, or 3.7 percent, to $38.486 on the Comex. The price jumped 5.2 percent on May 9. In technical analysis, investors study charts of trading patterns and prices to predict changes in a security, commodity, currency or index. To contact the reporter on this story: Yi Tian in New York at ytian8@bloomberg.net To contact the editor responsible for this story: Steve Stroth at sstroth@bloomberg.net.

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