In the last 10 years gold price has gone up 500%. But during the same 10 years silver has gone up 700%. So silver did 40% better than gold.
In the last 2 years gold has gone up 60%, but silver has gone up 176% .In 2010, gold went up 29%, but silver went up 78%.
Silver is best electrical conductor that exists-- even better than copper.
This makes it necessary in parts of electronic devices.
Half of the demand for silver is in industry, not jewelry or as a precious metal for investment.
Whereas gold has a much smaller demand in industry than silver.
The electronics industry is a fast growing industry. So the need for silver is constantly growing. Now I feel that it is important to try to recycle as much of this as possible even if it requires extra.
India has a billion people and a fast growing economy so this plays a part in the world's need for silver.
The middle class there is rapidly growing and they are investing in silver.
For many years China was an exporter of silver. But since 2007 they have been importing silver.
China is telling their 1.3 billion citizens to buy silver and invest in silver.
Pure branded silver is locked in plastic and cannot be taken out unless you want to pay to get it graded and sealed again.
Central banks around the world are now buying gold and silver.
As more people learn about this, more people will buy silver and the higher the price will go up beyond all the above explanations.
At the end of the 1980s, at the height of the Hunts' activities, gold was at $850 and silver at $50, a ratio of 1:17.
The notion that gold and silver prices should be linked, sometimes called the 'bimetallic' theory, goes back a long way.
The ratio of the two prices is still looked at by metals traders.
In the US, the gold/silver ratio was fixed by law at 1:15 in 1792.
A similar ratio was made law in France in 1803.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the figure was 1:27, up from 1:16 in 1850. Since 1900 the ratio has ranged between 1:22 in 1970 to 1:97 in 1940. The high point for the ratio in more recent times has been 1:66 in 2009.
The current ratio is 1:34.
The 1:15 ratio seen centuries ago has no particular relevance.
Markets were less perfect then, and both gold and silver used extensively for coinage. In fact silver in these times was the more extensively used for this purpose, hence the need for a legally fixed ratio to gold. That no longer applies.
The so-called commodity super cycle, in particular demand from China and India for Silver differs from gold in that it is more often than not produced as a by-product of the mining of tin, lead, zinc and copper.
Industrial materials, is likely to lead to increased production of these base metals, and hence a bigger supply of silver.
Industrial demand for silver has fallen in the last decade as a result lower demand for photographic processing as a result of the development of digital photography, although some new uses have been developed.
ETF and speculative demand is therefore the swing factor that has driven the price higher. Silver is also a notoriously volatile market.
A surge of tips flowing into my inbox for silver, both for physical silver investment and silver mining stocks, contributes to the feeling of a speculative excess.
The current ratio of gold to silver therefore looks to be as good as it gets.
The case for switching from silver to gold looks compelling.
Besides, retail customers and industrial units buying further fuelled the uptrend. Worldwide market demand for silver is growing, while supplies of silver are quickly disappearing. New high-tech uses for silver will further strain already-tight supplies in the future. World demand for silver now exceeds annual production and has every year since 1990, depleting above-ground stockpiles of silver.
The U.S. government, once the largest stockpile of silver on the planet, dumped billions and billions of ounces of silver onto the world market over the years, resulting in depressed silver prices. Today, that government silver hoard is gone, and now the U.S. government is a buyer of silver at prevailing world silver prices. For these reasons and many more, the silver market certainly appears to represent an outstanding investing opportunity Thousands of Monex customers have viewed our exclusive DVDs on the silver market, and after watching the programs, have projected substantial increases in the future price of silver. This fascinating program features more than a dozen financial experts including well-respected economists, market advisors and commentators, best-selling authors and even a former presidential candidate, who explore the looming economic crisis and along with sharing their forecasts and recommendations.