I stumbled across this article and I think it does put together a pretty solid case for Silver. I don't know if all these facts are true though. What are you guy's thoughts on this?
Silver - The Hidden Gem of the Decade
February 4, 2021 •
Why silver is the best investment, right after bitcoin! With the stock market rally and current crypto boom, precious metals are often overlooked as an investment. And even when people think about them, gold is the one that usually crosses their mind. In this article, I want to shed some light on why silver is probably one of the best investments for the next 5-10 years.
We will be focusing on the really big picture here, not weekly or monthly performance, but performance over years and decades. Let us start off by looking back over the silver price in the last 100 years.
Silver price over the last 100 years
We can see that, for the most part, silver has traded around or below 20$, even though the dollar has been deflating constantly. In fact, the dollar is worth more than 26-times less than it was in the 1920s. This constant in silver price is partly due to new supply of silver flooding the market, but also because of artificial price suppression.
What happened in the 1980s was also a result of manipulation but in the other direction. Namely by the infamous Hunt brothers, who have cornered the silver market by buying billions and billions of silver both in bullion and on margin. The event is called Silver Thursday and you can read more about it here. This spike was short-lived however and silver price once again plummeted back below the 20$ region.
In fact, silver was unable to escape this price region all the way up to 2008, when we had the last big economic crisis. We can see that in the years after the crisis, silver has rallied all the way to over 50$. This was due to investors seeking safe-haven assets to protect their wealth from deteriorating. Using silver as a store of value and a hedge against inflation has largely come into practice only after the year 2000's dot-com crash. After this spike in the years 2008-2011, silver once again plummeted to the 20$ region as the stock market regained momentum and investors became confident in putting their money into other assets.
1$ in 1913 would be worth 26.14$ now
Looking at how the dollar has lost over 95% of its value over the last 100-years, I personally find silver to have been extremely undervalued at just under 20$ in the years 2015-2020. But what happened in 2020 was in my opinion a historic moment for the silver price and a signal which indicates a very prosperous future for silver in the coming 5-10 years. Namely, for the first time ever, silver has managed to sustain above 20$ and create a new floor, from which it bounced after the crash in March 2020. To me, this indicates that silver may have finally been able to breach the 20$ region for good and it's ready for a sustained rise to higher prices. The march crash to nearly 11$ has served as a last shakeout of weak hands before the subsequent rally ensued.
A further narrative that is suggesting higher silver prices in the medium to long-term is the inevitable economic crisis that is coming due to the COVID-19 pandemic. People who think things will be going back to normal now that we have started vaccinating people and that the economy will be doing great in the next few years are in for a rude awakening. In my opinion, the exact opposite will happen once the worldwide lockdown finally ends and only then will we start seeing the real impact this will have on the economy. Our global debt has absolutely skyrocketed during the year of 2020 as a result of intense money printing to mitigate the losses that a global economic shutdown has caused. In fact, more money has been printed in 2020 than in the years 2010-2019 combined! As a result, commodities and consumables prices will most certainly rise in the coming years.
Silver has already proven itself to be a great store of value both after the 2000's dot-com crash and after the 2008 stock market crash. It is not unlikely in my opinion, to expect people once again putting their money into silver, among other safe-haven assets, such as gold and bitcoin. And it's already happening. Both gold, silver and bitcoin have posted significant gains in the second half of 2020, with bitcoin of course significantly outperforming both silver and gold. Between gold and silver however, I think silver has much, much more upside potential and may surprise a lot of people.
A lot of big investors (the smart money) have already been accumulating silver over the past 5 years. And it's usually never a bad idea to follow the smart money. A further indicator of silver's insane potential is the gold-to-silver ratio. What this chart is showing is basically how much silver you can buy with gold. It has never, ever, been higher in the entire 2000 years history of silver. The chart only shows the last 100 years, but you can take my word for it. And right now, we are seeing a reversal unfolding!
Gold-Silver ratio has reached an all-time high
Furthermore, we have many, many more use-cases for silver and the global demand for it is increasing. With mines shutting down during the pandemic, combined with people accumulating silver as a hedge against inflation, I think we have a perfect-storm for silver brewing and global silver shortage is inevitable.
Let us quickly glance over some of the use-cases. Silver has many industrial uses, accounting for more than half of annual demand worldwide over the last five years.
This means that economic growth can affect silver prices far more than it affects gold. Only 10-15% of annual gold demand worldwide comes from industrial use, the rest going to jewelry and investment.
The many different industrial uses for Silver
Because of silver's physical strength, brilliance, malleability and ductility (it can be squashed or pulled into shape), people have also used silver in jewelry, tableware and fine art for thousands of years. Industrial applications use silver's conductivity (the highest of any element for electricity and heat) as well as its sensitivity to light and anti-bacterial qualities.
Today silver is invaluable to solder and brazing alloys, batteries, dentistry, glass coatings, LED chips, medicine, nuclear reactors, photography, photovoltaic (or solar) energy, RFID chips (for tracking parcels or shipments worldwide), semiconductors, touch screens, water purification, wood preservatives and many other industrial uses. Washington-based industry group the Silver Institute calls it "the indispensable metal".
The biggest silver consumers in 2010
The biggest consumers of silver for industrial applications this past decade have been the US, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Germany and Thailand, while Italy's consumption is mainly focused on jewelry. Over that time silver demand from older industries has faded, only to be replaced by new technological uses.
As you see, silver is widely being used in modern technologies. A use case that has never been explored before. And with us shifting more and more towards a digital society, the demand for silver in this regard will also increase (and already has increased) substantially. In my opinion usage in technology and medicine, combined with it becoming a hedge against inflation, will largely contribute to the increase in silver price over the next 10-20 years.
Of course nothing in the markets is ever a certainty. But I hope that in this article today, I've managed to highlight the amazing potential of silver in the coming years and opened your eyes a bit to this hidden gem of an investment.
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Article source: https://mycryptomoment.com/blogs/crypto-blog/silver-the-hidden-gem-of-the-decade
