This week I made my first ever physical silver purchase as I personally believe silver is extremely undervalued.
I don’t believe that silver should be like $500 or something crazy, but because of the myriad uses (especially in solar) and the very few mines actually mining for silver, I think the supply is not adequate for demand.
What are your thoughts?
Where do you think prices will be in the next 1-5 years?
Good luck with your speculation.
Here’s a source that expects Silver prices to fall in the future.
You don’t buy metals expecting to get a good return.
You buy them hoping to avoid losing the principal, when you expect the rest of the economy to crash.
Curious how prices are expected to fall as mining is becoming increasingly scarce.
I read an article that went through historical data and mines used to produce 15oz per ton, now they average 6.
Granted a lot more material can be gone through with modern machinery, but also at a higher cost.
Last year you thought silver was awful low at $14.50. It’s now 25% higher, is it still awful low? What do you think silver should be trading at and why?
Well if he had taken his own advise a last year, he’d made a 25% return!
I guess he finally succumbed to his own pressure.
He has clearly stated that he believes that silver prices will continue to rise due to demand in certain industries and the cut back on silver mining.
What he doesn’t consider is that if the price of silver rises, then the mining of it will increase to meet the needed demand, and the price will in turn decline.
I’m not aware of depletion of silver and lack of untapped mined resources. So my expectation is that silver prices will continue to be volatile over various cycles. Market timing is a difficult strategy to use for investing regardless of the underlying security basis: gold, stocks, currencies, interest rates, etc.
Well…I wasn’t wrong?
I made some money when the Hunt brothers tried to corner the silver market in 1979
Commodities prices fluctuate, that’s what they do. You guessed right once over the span of about a year. Time will tell if you were lucky or good.
Silver price will rise again with the next vampire uprising just like what happened in 1980 and in 2011. We can not predict when though.
About 48% of silver mined is used for jewelry, coins, bullion or silverware. The comparable number for gold is about 85%(). Most silver mined is a “byproduct” from mines with a different primary purpose — lead/zinc (38%), copper (22%), gold (13%) — leaving just 27% to come from primary silver mines. ( - Figure refers to new production, not existing inventory, so may be misleading.)
For centuries the gold-silver price ratio was held nearly constant but, as seen on this graph the price ratio has fluctuated since 1915, reaching peaks in 1940, 1990 and today. So silver is under-priced relative to gold, if that ratio will return to “normal” levels. But past performance is no guarantee of future results.
Please PM me if someone knows the answer! Never a gold-bug in the past, I acted a few months ago and now have 10% of my portfolio in a Gold ETF and 4% in a Silver ETF. I’ve been lucky so far, and have no plan to change these positions. (Just regret that I lacked the gumption to make a bigger move! 
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Did you ever consider that the reason silver mining is becoming increasingly scares is because silver prices are falling? It makes sense that companies would reduce the mining of something that was losing value and not likely to return enough profit to justify the expense and effort of mining. Reduction in mining is not evidence of a future increase in value. In fact, it’s probably the opposite.
I’ve played in silver and gold to some extent for more than 40 years and I’ve done pretty well. Usually my buying is lower than current and my two bigger sell-downs were at serious highs. I enjoy it but I realize the pay-days are very few and very far inbetween and its as much for the fun of the hunt as it is a serious investment.
Good point. As part of the general point that you have to consider all kinds of price elasticities to predict future prices of commodities. It’s not just a matter of predicting ‘future demand’ (at a given implicit price). Which is to begin with essentially impossible. How much more would be mined if higher prices justified more marginal mines. How non-essential uses like jewelry would decrease with price. Silver is more difficult to predict than gold because there’s such a large set of those questions for industrial uses (substitution if the price goes up), silver is a hybrid industrial-precious metal where gold is used in some industrial processes but largely a precious metal in price dynamics.
You can luck out on big up moves in silver or gold in the normal course of things, but that’s all you’re doing. That’s all the ‘guru who was right last time’ was doing so their prognostications now aren’t any more reliable than anyone’s else’s.
Separately precious metals will likely rise a lot if the shit really hits the fan so might be a good hedge for a portion of a portfolio for that reason. Problems with silver in that regard are 1) huge weight for a significant amount of money at today’s prices (a tonne of silver is only worth ~$600k, that much gold is personally transportable, ~26lbs) which implies financial products rather than physical to take really significant positions in silver, then if things really go bad enough paper financial products become questionable and 2) as said, silver is partly an industrial metal so that demand goes away in extremely dire cases.
A small allocation to gold is justifiable as armageddon hedge, including a subset of it in physical, silver not worth bothering with, IMO.
He was a good horse.
Long ago, when I got married, I bought my wife a beautiful ring. For the ceremony I bought myself the cheapest gold band I could find, as I do not wear jewelry. Then, the price of gold began climbing. Maybe 8 months after the wedding I sold my ring for the scrap value and made a nice profit.
I thought I’d done a good thing, my wife disagreed.