Supply decreases and demand increases.
Silver, like gold, has both commodity and monetary attributes. The difference is that the commodity property of silver is stronger than the monetary property. Statistics show that the quantity and supply of silver are rapidly decreasing, while the demand for silver is obviously increasing.
According to statistics, 70% of the supply of silver comes from mining, and the rest is mainly composed of scrap silver recovery, manufacturer hedging (futures products are sold in mines) and official sales. Due to the decrease of associated minerals of basic metals (especially lead/zinc smelting industry in China), the supply of silver ore, which has been growing strongly in recent years, slowed down sharply in 2009.
With the shadow of the financial crisis fading away and the huge economic stimulus plans launched by various countries, the global economy is gradually recovering. The demand for silver began to increase significantly. Song Hongbing, author of Currency War, said that at present, silver is widely used in the fields of new energy, mobile phones, liquid crystals, batteries and other new materials. At present, the annual demand for silver is about 27,000 tons. With the extensive use of environmental protection and new energy, this demand will increase by a large proportion. With the decline of world silver inventory and the strong growth of silver investment demand, silver has increasingly become a "depression" of value.
Investment attributes gradually return.
In human history, both gold and silver have been used as the most important currencies, and silver has become an international currency before the pound and the dollar. In the long feudal era, the monetary system in China used to implement the silver standard for a long time, from silver ingots in previous dynasties to various versions of silver dollars in modern times. Silver has played an important role in China's monetary history.
With the evolution of history, the monetary attribute of silver gradually faded out of the world economic stage, but its investment attribute as a precious metal kept its lasting vitality. The annual turnover of new york silver futures products is not less than the average annual turnover of gold products. Silver has become a widely accepted investment variety in the world, and the trading varieties are also very rich, mainly including silver spot, futures, options, silver stocks, silver EFT funds and so on.
The World Silver Association's 2009 global silver survey shows that the main factor pushing up the silver price last year was investment demand, and this trend will continue. At present, the positions of the three major silver ETFs (BGI, global investor of Barclays in new york, ETFSecurities in London and ZKB in Switzerland) in the international market have all increased substantially, and the positions have increased several times this year. The investment value of silver has been underestimated for a long time, so it also contains more investment opportunities.
Gold has a price effect.
Compared with gold, the investment value of silver is also obvious. According to statistics, in 1940, the world gold stock was 100 billion ounces, and it increased to 5 billion ounces in 2009. 1940 had 10 billion ounces of silver, but now it is only about 10 billion ounces. The stock of silver was 10 times that of gold 70 years ago, and now it is only15 of gold. With the decline of world silver stocks, the growth of silver supply in the future will not meet the growth of demand, so many experts believe that its current value is seriously underestimated.
From the price point of view, the price of gold used to be about 40 times that of silver in history, the lowest was 15 times, and now it has exceeded 50 times. The increase in price also highlights the investment value of silver. The price of silver has been rising since August this year. As of June 9, 165438, spot silver rose from 18 USD/ounce to 29.32 USD/ounce in more than three months, with an increase of nearly 62%. In the same period, the biggest increase of international gold price was only 15.5%.
The risk of speculating in silver is greater than that of speculating in gold.
I have to remind you that risks and benefits coexist, and silver has risen greatly, accompanied by greater fluctuations. Taking the trend in 2009 as an example, gold rose by 25.5% for the whole year, with the largest fluctuation range of 53%; However, silver rose by 48.7% for the whole year, with the largest fluctuation of 88.5%.
Due to the small market capacity, the price is easily manipulated, and the stability of silver is not as good as that of gold. At the same time, because the unit market price of silver is much lower than that of gold, even the same trading volume, the total trading volume of the market is far less than that of gold, so it is easy to be driven by funds and affect the price change, and the market hot money is also easy to enter and exit to participate in speculative operations, which will also lead to large fluctuations in the price of silver.
At present, the main silver investment product that individual investors can participate in is the spot deferred settlement business of Shanghai Gold Exchange, which is a leveraged transaction, which may not only gain excess returns, but also suffer excess losses, and may lead to the risk of being forced out when the losses exceed the margin.