Silver Price Today – Forbes Advisor

The price of silver today, at 8:17 a.m. ET, was $19 an ounce. That’s a 2.86% drop from yesterday’s silver price of $20.

Compared to last week, the price of silver is down 2.66% and 3.65% from last month.

The 52-week high for silver is $18, while the 52-week low for silver is $21.

Silver Price Today

Silver Price Chart

How to invest in silver

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

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

• Silver ingot. You can purchase investment grade silver bars with 99.9% purity in weights ranging from 1 ounce to 100 ounces. Lower weight bars may be easier to sell in a tough market than larger bars.
• Silver coins. There are a variety of silver coins available for purchase in the market, including mint 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, which is the official silver bullion coin of Canada. Both weigh one ounce and are guaranteed to be 99.9% pure silver.
• Silver futures. Futures contracts are derivative contracts where 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 price and hedge their larger portfolios, providing exposure without the hassle of handling the physical metal. Futures contracts can be easily sold before they expire.
• Money stocks. Owning shares of publicly traded silver mining companies is an easy way to gain exposure to silver without owning physical metal. Just be aware that silver stock prices may only be loosely correlated with the price of silver.
• Silver ETFs. There are more than a few silver themed exchange traded funds. Typically, they invest in a diversified basket of silver assets, including stocks, physical bullion or futures.

Silver versus 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 key differences.

• Utility. Precious metals like gold and silver have little commercial utility. Beyond their use as stores of value, they have relatively few industrial uses. That said, compared to gold, silver has many more industrial and commercial uses – about half of the silver traded in the markets is used commercially, in applications ranging from dentistry to electronics.
• Relationship to markets. The price of silver tends to follow the performance of the overall stock market and economy. During economic expansions, silver prices tend to rise with GDP and the markets, while during recessions, silver prices generally fall as the economy slows down. Gold prices tend to move in the opposite direction, rising when the economy is tough and falling during boom times.
• Price volatility. The unit price of silver is a fraction of the price of gold – the current price of silver is $19 per ounce while gold is $1,650 per 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 go up and down more frequently and with greater magnitude, you exposing you to greater potential gains and losses.

Should you invest in silver?

If you want to further diversify your portfolio, silver can be a good investment as part of a broader basket of commodities. A good rule of thumb is to allocate no more than 5% of your investments to commodities, although this amount may be higher or lower depending on your goals and time horizon.

It makes sense to invest in silver under certain market conditions. When supply and demand are out of balance, it’s a good time to invest in silver. When prices are low and you find a silver company that has a proven ability to exploit the situation, that’s when you want to buy.

Is money a hedge against inflation?

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

During the oil shock of 1973 to 1979, average annual inflation in the United States was around 8.8%. Over the same period, silver averaged an 80.8% annual gain, thanks in part to Herbert and Nelson Hunt’s attempt to corner the market in 1979.

If you omit the unusual situation involving the Hunt brothers, silver averaged a 22% gain from 1973 to 1978, more than twice 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 sharply by 23%. There was an average annual inflation of about 4.6% from 1988 to 1991, but average annual silver prices fell by 12.7%.

Since April 2021, the monthly consumer price index in the United States has averaged an annual gain of almost 7%, but the price of silver has fallen by 25%.

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

*The silver price data above is provided by Zyla Labs, which obtains asset price data from a wide range of sources. This silver price represents an average of spot silver prices on several major metal exchanges. Prices are updated once per business day.