The precious metal tends to move in tandem with gold prices when it comes to such situations but after the volatile selling at the end of January, the landscape has changed quite a lot. Despite the recovery momentum in recent weeks and also at the start of this week, the volatility bouts are still running in silver it would seem.At the open this week, silver prices jumped up to above $96 but are now dropping hard with the low earlier touching just under $83.It's a quite a notable fall, adding to the sharp decline in US trading yester day as well. And this also comes as gold is losing added ground after having also peaked yesterday above $5,400. Gold prices have dropped to a low of $5,280 earlier and are now still down 0.4% on the day at around $5,303.The opening gap higher for the week in gold was briefly closed yesterday and price action is looking to revisit that again around the $5,278 level.Circling back to the silver chart above, the near-term momentum has clearly shifted now for the precious metal. The drop yesterday saw the more bullish near-term bias dissipate. And after that, buyers struggled to get price back above the 100-hour moving average (red line). That's now leading to a further loss in altitude with silver dropping back under the 200-hour moving average (blue line). As such, the near-term bias is now more bearish once again.If anything, it continues to highlight that the recovery path for silver is going to be tough. And that major profit-taking and corrective move at the end of January does have some reverberations in terms of impacting trading sentiment. That being any recovery or dip buying will not be as smooth and one-sided as it was before, like last year.I would argue that the price action here suggests that the flush lower at the end of January has not quite run its course. And on any recovery path, we could see more triggers for volatile selling.For now though, the US-Iran conflict will be the main focus. But as a reminder, markets these days don't take long to move on from one story to another. So, that might also impact the allure for precious metals unless the conflict escalates further in the coming days. This article was written by Justin Low at investinglive.com.