Any One Stacking Silver Bullion

I am talking to the average upper lower/middle class 20-35 year old. Much better to pay that mortgage down and cut some of that interest off than take a risk on a monster box of maples.

While I will agree that "cherry picking" some stock to show that it did better than silver is possible, that wasn't my point really. The real point is pick a stock rather than silver as an investment. Silver was in the $4.50 - $5.50 range in the late 70s. That's the price it was in my January 2000 example as well. So while there was definite upside in silver prices during that 22-24 year stretch, if you were a "buy and holder" you lost money (just inflation alone killed it even if you broke even on a $ basis). So while cherry picking a stock to show a point it shows a real point...buy the stock as an investment. Obviously tons of stocks have come and gone and performed horribly. I'm not talking about investing in the latest tech stock or the bio-tech who hopes they found a cure for something... invest in solid companies that are not going anywhere. There's a reason the biggest companies are the biggest. In Canada, our banks are going no where...they will always make money and continually pay a dividend. If I had simply bought all bank stocks back in the late 90s instead of taking the diversified route like planners advocate, my RRSP value would be more than triple what it is now. So in the years I've learned, buy only the biggest companies. Sure you could get lucky and ride some tech stock to the stars but it's like winning a lottery...odds are not in your favour.

well world equity markets are large and dynamic. Why?

world markets have many forces at work. There are-

* intra-day traders
*momentum/trend traders
*swing traders

then there is the investing side-

value funds, growth funds, long/short funds

All of these, in their respective "TIME FRAMES" will out do silver bullion/gold bullion.

Silver and gold, you can make money on these in several time frames as well but it will be limited. I think you could take a stab at investing in gold and silver but it requires that you don't go whole hog and at the same time, you might be required to do house cleaning on a regular basis just as the market works on cycles.

One big thing that stocks have going for them versus gold and silver is the divy they pay. You cant beat that. Old stodgy names always carry a history of constant dividend payments and will increase as the share price goes down. For the Canadians, there are a wealth of oil and gas names, oil and gas trusts and other global names that pay a regular dividend and as Goop said, just aren't going anywhere.

As an interesting side note, I looked up the historical US interest rates for CDs and calculated $30 invested in 1967 would be today: $421 (1 YR CD) $543 (2 YR CD) and $792 (4 YR CD). Obviously, that doesn't account for income taxes... but there was time when interest income less than a certain limit was tax exempt.

What's also interesting is that $800 is just about the going price for the entire 1967 commemorative set on ebay today, which also includes the gold and the silver coins.

I'm glad this thread came back. It had me read some of the discussions back in early 2012... so fast forward to today... Silver prices has steadily declined since then.

"Total silver fabrication demand in 2012 dipped to 846.8 Moz, reflecting losses in key areas. Industrial silver fabrication slipped by 4 percent to 465.9 Moz (...)Photographic demand for silver fell to 57.8 Moz, while the silverware sector slipped to 44.9 Moz due to ongoing structural factors and economic weakness.

--https://www.silverinstitute.org/site/supply-demand/silver-demand/

Current demand is only sustained by investors, coin collectors and producer de-hedging which can easily vanish in a blink and return to 2003 levels once people realize that silver is never going to hit $100/oz. in the foreseeable future.

It's all about balance. You want enough to make money if it goes up, but not too much that you don't make money on stocks. From what I've researched, I'd say about 20% max of your portfolio is good, maybe 10% in the short term. I expect silver to drop below 20 in the next three months. At that point, go from 10% to 20%. Once you get a solid 20% of silver in hand (vs paper silver,) add about 10% of your total per month investment.

The new America the Beautiful silver bullion 5 oz coin is available soon. Appears to be a good bang for the buck, especially with lower silver prices.

Provident medals is offering a pre-sale for the Mount Rushmore coin at the end of October. Nice coin...

http://www.providentmetals.com/2013...autiful.html

I've been more conservative lately with purchases, I just buy 100 oz. silver and 1 oz. gold yearly. The business cycle is really quite ramped up, even though it is finally relaxing, the big players are still putting it away .. maybe out of fear that they don't want to pay the kind of prices from the last couple of years. Still, I think we are going to end up with a glut of silver, copper for sure, and when another recession strikes, that would seem a better time to buy bullion.