Investment in gold and silver

  Silver is More Affordable

This seems like an obvious statement, but the reason it’s important is because silver has many similarities with gold…


If you buy physical silver—not ETFs, certificates or futures contracts, which are paper investments—you can capture the same benefits that gold offers. Advantages that virtually no other asset provides.


Like gold, physical silver…


Is a hard asset. Of all the investments you own, how many can you hold in your hand? In a world of paper profits, digital trading, and currency creation, physical silver is a tangible asset that can’t be hacked (something your stock broker constantly guards against).

Is money, just like gold. It can’t be created out of thin air (and thus depreciated) like paper currency or digital entries. Look through monetary history and you’ll find that silver has been used in coinage more often than gold.

Investment in gold and silver

Has no counterparty risk. If you hold physical silver, you don’t need another party to make good on a contract or promise.

Has never been defaulted on. If you own physical silver, you have no default risk. Not so for almost any other investment you make.

Can be as private and confidential. You must report any gain on your income tax return, but if you’d like some privacy or confidentiality with a portion of your investments, physical silver can provide it.


Gold vs. Silver

You’d like to buy some precious metals, but do you buy silver or gold? Is there really much difference between them other than the price?




Both are “precious” metals, meaning their occurrence in the earth’s crust is rare. But when it comes to investing in gold vs. silver, there are five important distinctions to be aware of. These differences can supercharge your portfolio—or make it a victim.

1: The Silver Price is More Volatile

The total supply of new silver each year is close to 1 billion ounces. Annual gold supply is currently around 120 million ounces.


This makes it seem like the silver market is 8 times bigger than gold. But just the opposite is true, because of the huge difference in their price. Silver’s lower price makes the value of annual supply much smaller than gold’s.

Investor Implication: You must be emotionally prepared for silver’s higher volatility.

It won’t do any good to buy the metal if you’ll panic and sell at the first big drop.

4: Silver Has Higher Industrial Use

About 12% of gold supply goes to industrial uses. But due to silver’s unique characteristics, a whopping 56% of its supply is used in industry. Silver has so many applications that believe it or not, you don’t go one day without using a product that contains it.


From electronics and medical applications, to batteries and solar panels, silver is everywhere, whether you see it or not.


As Mike Maloney says in his book, “Of all the elements, silver is the indispensable metal. It is the most electronically conducive, thermally conductive, and reflective. Modern life, as we know it, would not exist without silver.”


Why is this important? Because the state of the global economy can have a greater impact on silver demand than gold. Silver is thus more susceptible to economic booms and busts.


In fact, as an investor, this volatility can be your friend. Historically, silver has fallen more than gold in bear markets, but risen more than gold in bull markets.

3: Silver Requires Much More Storage Space

All those affordability advantages we just outlined come with a catch: it takes a LOT more space to store silver than gold.


At current prices, the same dollar investment will get you roughly 80 more ounces of silver than gold. On top of that, most silver is a lot less dense than gold—pure silver is 84% larger in volume than pure gold. This means silver takes up as much as 128 times more space than gold for the same dollar value!


Here are some practical examples of that difference. At current prices…


You can hold $50,000 worth of gold in one hand—but it would take about 10 large shoe boxes to hold the same dollar amount of silver.

$50,000 worth of gold weighs about 2.6 pounds—but the same value of silver weighs about 189 pounds!

You can store roughly $170,000 of gold in a small safe deposit box, but that same space will only hold about $2,300 of silver.

It’s relatively easy to hide some gold coins in a sock drawer or cookie jar, but those same hiding places are impractical for the same investment in silver. Whether you buy coins or bars, you’ll need a lot more space to store silver than gold.


And because it requires more space, the fees for professional storage are higher with most depositories. (However, in the case of [JC1] GoldSilver.com, the storage rate is the same for both metals: 0.06% of asset value per month, $4 minimum, a clear advantage over most storage facilities.)


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