Silver stackers around the world have been waiting for silver to make the moonshot for ages.
Is the silver rocket going to take off soon and start its ascent to the moon? Are we about to witness ignition and blast off? Or is this just a false start, a failure to launch?
By the way, as an aside, for those of you who don’t know … silver has long been associated with the moon and gold with the sun. The Aztecs referred to gold as “the sweat of the sun” and silver as the “tears of the moon”.
Anyway, poetic matters aside, let’s turn and have a quick look at more practical considerations with regard to silver.
Every year about 1 billion ounces is mined. The mined ore is crushed, smelted and then refined to be sold on to the retail market for companies, or individuals to buy. Some of it goes to Nationally owned mints around the world to be made into bullion and bars etc.
Interestingly, much of silver that comes out of the ground is a by-product. This means that silver is not the principal product that the mining company is after – the focus of the mining company might be on producing copper, or iron or some other ore. Silver is simply something that gets produced along the way as part of the process.
Silver is a monetary metal – it’s considered as being money, real money, not the currency that masquerades as money these days - but anyhow … I don’t want to get diverted by talking about all that – important though it is …
Silver is also an industrial metal.
It might be a surprise to know that industrial uses account for about 75% of the demand for silver. So some 750,000 million ounces of silver gets used by industry.
Silver is a key manufacturing component for electronic goods like TVs, smart phones and laptops because of its’ super-conductive qualities. Without silver, much of our modern life would come to a standstill – at least until such time as a suitable replacement was found.
Let’s now consider the price of silver.
The spot price of silver per ounce is now bobbing around the $25 mark.
Here’s an interesting little fact for you, the silver price today is half the price that it reached in 1980. It got up to $50 per ounce in the year.
Silver could then be regarded as being cheap.
Another hugely important issue when considering silver is that unfortunately, there’s massive manipulation in the precious metals markets.
I’ve done a number of videos of the manipulation in the precious metals markets, so I refer you to those, if you are at all interested.
But the latest bit of news … on the 24th February the Bank of America dumped over 1 Billion ounces worth of silver contracts on the COMEX in order to “tamp down” the silver price - to get it below the 200 day moving average again. That’s equivalent to the entire amount coming out to the ground for a whole year sold - all in only one single day of trading.
Why is it done? Manipulation in the precious metals markets is done for a very specific reason. Manipulations are done to preserve
