Silver is not acting as a store of wealth at the moment. It’s positively correlated (but not perfectly positively) to the stock market right now, so when the stock market goes up silver goes up and vice versa. It’s because it’s acting more as an industrial metal at the moment due to its use in electronics, specifically phones. Whatever you think the market is going to do right now is what silver going to do. Something will need to happen to cause it to start acting as a store of wealth.
If Google is serving me properly there is about 16¢ worth of silver in an iPhone at the current spot price. That doesn’t seem like a lot.
Stocks rose spectacularly in the 1990’s while the silver price moved very little. Silver roughly tripled in price during 2007 to 2011, a period when stocks lost value. Since its peak in 2011, silver has lost ⅔ of its value — while stocks rose spectacularly.
Thus, I think we can agree with you that correlation between silver prices and stock prices has not been “perfectly positive” of late! 
On the last point, yeah, you seem sarcastic and a little overboard v what I actually posted.
I don’t see the word ‘onerous’ in my post about 0.5% expense ratio. I said it’s significant compared to an expected return of inflation, which I think is just a fact.
Otherwise I simply laid out the comparative costs, without fluffing up the post with obvious points such as that you are self insuring if you keep precious metals at home, or that SDB’s aren’t free* if you go that route. That implied cost is very variable though. Some people live in high crime areas, others don’t but are paranoid about crime. Inductive experience of decades says the chance of a burglary of my house is very low and it would be tough to find stuff I hid in a quick run through. Though anyway I keep my (<1% of assets) physical gold hoard in my bank safe deposit box.
I also previously mentioned that from POV silver has much too low a value to make a serious investment in physical and hold it myself. An investment that moved the needle for me would be an impractical weight of silver to hold myself. So yeah, if I bought the argument for silver as investment I’d do it paper-physical. But I don’t really buy the argument that a significant % in precious metals is that attractive in general, and for a very small worst comes to worst IMO gold is superior. Silver is a quasi industrial metal. But people can make their own investment decisions obviously, and also for some people a ‘big’ investment in silver would be a manageable amount to hold personally.
*a small one actually might be included at no extra charge in some package deal to open an account with such and such balance with the bank, but overall obviously the bank is in business to make money, like the ETF sponsor.
Sorry for fluffing up my post with the word ‘onerous’ — I wanted to make sure my meaning was clear, but should NOT have gotten sarcastic. I apologize.
I think we agree that bank box charge would be far more than 0.39% to store silver and therefore gold might be more appropriate to discuss. But OP did ask about silver.
And I still wonder what the buy-sell spreads are on physical silver or gold. I suspect you’ll need to hold the metal for many years to outperform 0.39% annual expense even if your safety-deposit box is free.
I’ve replaced 0.5% with 0.39% above because the latter is the expense ratio for SGOL which now holds 2% of my assets. (I don’t remember the reason, if any, I picked SGOL instead of Gold ETFs with slightly lower fees.)
Is there a risk that SGOL will turn out to be a Ponzi? Or that they’ve been gulled into buying tungsten? Just for fun I clicked around today. to find their “List of Gold Bars … audited twice annually.” Having wasted that time, I even wrote up an account of my search, hoping it to be humorous. If there’s interest I may post it in Mundane Pointless.