July 5, 2016 --On the heels of its best week in three years, silver continued ascending further during international trading on Monday. Despite the market holiday here in the U.S., the white metal still managed to post strong gains after gaining nearly 11% last week. Silver busted first through $20 and even touched $21 during the Asian trading session, before it finally found resistance and ran into technical selling.

Meanwhile, gold's gains over the last week have been solid -- but not overwhelming. As a result, the gold to silver ratio has narrowed significantly in favor of silver, reaching its lowest level in nearly two years. At one point the ratio fell to nearly 64 to 1 on Sunday night before finally widening... that means it took only 64 ounces of silver to buy one ounce of gold. That's quite a turn from when we saw the gold/silver ratio as high as 83 back in February.

The question now is whether or not the precious metals can hold on to these gains in the days ahead. Of course, markets seldom go up in a straight line, so a pullback wouldn't be at all surprising in the near term. Regardless, recent action has been extremely positive for these markets.

Live prices at MoneyMetals.com show gold currently trading at $1,349.45 per ounce on the global market, and silver is coming in at $19.81.