New Silver Bull Coming
By: Adam Hamilton, CPA
SilverSeek.com
April 6, 2018
Silver has been dead money over the past year or so, relentlessly grinding sideways to lower. That weak price action has naturally left this classic alternative investment deeply out of favor. Silver is extremely undervalued relative to gold, while speculators’ silver-futures positions are extraordinarily bearish. All this has created the perfect breeding ground to birth a major new silver bull market, which could erupt anytime.
Silver’s price behavior is unusual, making it a challenging investment psychologically. Most of the time silver is maddeningly boring, drifting listlessly for months or sometimes years on end. So the vast majority of investors abandon it and move on, which is exactly what’s happened since late 2016. There’s so little interest in silver these days that even traditional primary silver miners are actively diversifying into gold!
But just when silver is universally left for dead, one of its massive uplegs or bull markets suddenly ignites. Some catalyst, typically a major gold rally, convinces investors to return to silver. Their big capital inflows easily overwhelm the tiny global silver market, catapulting this metal sharply higher. Silver skyrockets to amazing wealth-multiplying gains, dwarfing nearly everything else. This reinvigorates silver’s cult-like following.
Silver’s dominant primary driver has long been gold, which controls all precious-metals sentiment. When gold isn’t doing anything exciting, silver languishes neglected. But once gold rallies high enough for long enough to convince investors a major upleg is underway, capital starts returning to silver. Thus silver is effectively a leveraged play on gold, amplifying its price action. Silver never soars unless gold is strong.
This psychological relationship is so ironclad it may as well be fundamental. The global silver and gold supply-and-demand profiles are technically independent, with little direct linkage physically. But when investment demand flares to drive gold higher, parallel silver investment demand soon materializes. So silver and gold often move in lockstep, especially when gold’s price action is interesting enough to catch attention.
All this makes the Silver/Gold Ratio the most-important fundamental measure for silver prices. The lower silver prices happen to be compared to prevailing gold ones, the greater the odds a major silver mean-reversion rally is imminent. And today silver is almost as low relative to gold as it’s ever been in the past century! This first chart looks at the SGR, or more precisely the inverted GSR, over the past 13 years or so.
The Rest…HERE
