Silver Price Today – Forbes Advisor

Silver was trading at $20 an ounce as of 9:41am ET today. That’s up 1.03% from yesterday’s silver price of $19.

Compared to last week, silver prices are up 0.09% and down 0.80% mom.

The 52 week silver price high is $18 while the 52 week silver price low is $21.

silver prices today

Silver price chart

How to invest in silver

Silver has long been recognized as a reliable asset to diversify your investment portfolio. Some investors choose silver to hedge their other holdings, while others see it as a store of value to help in uncertain times.

Here are the most common ways to invest in silver, from owning bullion to buying shares in companies involved in silver production.

• silver bullion. You can buy investment grade silver bars with a purity of 99.9% in weights from 1 ounce to 100 ounces. Lighter weight bars can be easier to sell in a tough market than larger bars.
• silver coins. A variety of silver coins are available on the market, including both newly issued coins and collector coins. Popular choices include the American Silver Eagle, the official silver bullion coin of the United States, and the Canadian Silver Maple Leaf, the official silver bullion coin of Canada. Both weigh one ounce and are guaranteed to be 99.9% pure silver.
• Silver Futures Contracts. Futures are derivative contracts in which a buyer agrees to buy a specified amount of silver at a predetermined price on a future date. Silver futures allow sophisticated investors to speculate on prices and hedge their broader portfolios, providing exposure without the hassle of dealing with physical metal. Futures contracts can easily be sold before they expire.
• silver stocks. Owning shares in publicly traded silver mining companies is an easy way to get silver without owning physical metal. Be warned, however, that silver stock prices may be weakly correlated to the price of silver.
• Silver ETFs. There are more than a few silver-focused thematic exchange-traded funds. They typically invest in a diversified basket of silver assets, including stocks, physical bars, or futures contracts.

Silver vs Gold

Silver and gold are among the most popular alternative investments on the market, attracting more investor interest and trading liquidity than other precious metals. Here’s how you should understand their main differences.

• utility. Precious metals such as gold and silver have little commercial use. Aside from their use as a store of value, they have relatively few industrial uses. However, silver has many more industrial and commercial uses compared to gold – about half of the silver traded in the markets is used commercially, in applications ranging from dentistry to electronics.
• relationship with markets. Silver prices typically follow the performance of the overall stock market and economy. During economic expansion, silver prices tend to rise with GDP and markets, while silver prices generally fall during a recession when the economy slows. The price of gold tends to move in the opposite direction, rising when the economy is tight and falling when the economy is booming.
• price volatility. Silver unit prices are a fraction of gold prices – today’s silver price is $20 an ounce while gold is $1,675 an ounce. Lower-priced financial assets tend to be more volatile than higher-priced assets, and since silver is almost always much cheaper than gold, prices move up and down by larger orders of magnitude more often, exposing you to greater potential gains and losses.

Should You Invest in Silver?

If you’re looking to further diversify your portfolio, silver can be a good investment as part of a larger basket of commodities. A good rule of thumb is not to invest more than 5% of your investments in commodities, although this amount could be higher or lower depending on your goals and time horizon.

Under certain market conditions it makes sense to invest in silver. When supply and demand are out of balance, it’s the right time to invest in silver. If prices are low and you find a silver company that has proven its ability to take advantage of the situation, then buy.

Is silver an inflation hedge?

When inflation picks up, some investors believe that precious metals like silver offer a good hedge against price increases. In fact, silver is only an effective hedge against inflation over extremely long periods of time, measured in decades or centuries.

During the oil price shock of 1973-1979, average annual inflation in the US was around 8.8%. Over the same period, silver posted an 80.8% average annual gain – thanks in part to the attempt by Herbert and Nelson Hunt corner of the market 1979

Excluding the unusual situation with the Hunt brothers, silver rose an average of 22% from 1973 to 1978, more than double the average rate of inflation.

Silver has not been an effective hedge against inflation since the 1970s. From 1980 to 1984, annual inflation averaged 6.5%, but silver prices fell nearly 23%. From 1988 to 1991 there was average annual inflation of about 4.6%, but average annual silver prices fell 12.7%.

Since April 2021, the monthly US CPI has posted a compound annual gain of nearly 7%, but silver prices are down 25%.

Over extremely long periods of time, measured in decades, silver has proven to be an effective hedge against inflation. On shorter timeframes, silver may not be the best way to protect your portfolio from price increases.

*The silver price data above is provided by Zyla Labs, which pulls asset price data from a variety of sources. This silver price represents an average of spot silver prices across several leading metal exchanges. Prices are updated once every business day.