Silver Prices Rose 420% the Last Time This Happened

Inspiring article. Check it out. You will feel better.

CYA: SE:
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Reprinted from: TruthinGold

Silver investors have suffered enormously over the last few years. But a key indicator reveals the grey metal may finally be due for a comeback. The last time investors followed this metric over the bellyaching of bearish analysts, they made 420%. The time before that, silver prices tripled, earning huge profits for those who timed the market.

You won’t get rich overnight—that’s a fool’s errand. This is a buy-and-hold strategy founded on the belief that silver is vastly underpriced, and there’s a lot of money to be made so long as investors exercise patience and planning.

Silver prices fell nearly 70% after peaking in 2011, with over 27% of that decline coming in the last 52 weeks. What happened? An ounce of gold was worth 32 ounces of silver just four years ago, but now the same ounce of gold costs 74 ounces of silver. Why is silver so disproportionately undervalued?

The answer lies in the silver-to-gold price ratio. The ratio tracks the correlation between gold and silver prices over time since the two metals tend to move in tandem. When gold prices rise, silver tends to follow, and vice versa. However, the movement is not always perfectly synchronized and the ratio will occasionally drift too far from the mean.

When the price differential between gold and silver diverges, investors should be paying attention. Historically, silver trades at roughly 43:1 with gold, far below the current ratio. An excessively high silver-to-gold ratio implies that silver is trading at a discount because investors became overly bearish on the grey metal.
Silver - Spot Price Chart

Investors made a killing the last three times gold was expensive relative to silver. In the run-up to1995, 2003, and 2011, we saw the ratio plunge after breaking 70, causing the price of silver to rise 70%, 200%, and 420% respectively. Right now the ratio is hovering between 73 and 75, indicating a coming boom for silver.

Another important thing to remember is that silver and gold aren’t just words on a page; they are physical properties that need to be extracted from the Earth. There are finite volumes for each metal, and far more than anything else, the size of those deposits should dictate prices.
When you compare the physical abundance of silver and gold reserves, an astonishing truth emerges: even by historical standards, silver is underpriced. The physical relationship between the two commodities is 17:1! Holding gold prices steady at $1,084, the natural conversion rate suggests silver’s intrinsic value is closer to $64.00 an ounce.

The last time the silver-to-gold ratio peaked, it was followed by a dramatic rise in silver prices to rebalance the discrepancy. Ultimately, reality is the counterweight to animal spirits in the market. There’s only so long that excessive pessimism or optimism can distort prices before market fundamentals will force investors to rethink their positions.

The conventional wisdom of 1999 demanded that investors swear fealty to the stock market. The Dot Com bubble had induced markets to behave with what Alan Greenspan called “irrational exuberance.” It didn’t matter that internet companies lacked a viable business model or any foreseeable revenues; all that mattered was the self-fulfilling optimism of a bull market.
As we know, that type of thinking ended in catastrophe. What I find interesting is the perfect inverse correlation between that stock market boom/bust and the rise/fall of the silver-to-gold ratio. The relationship is plain as day, and now the metric is disturbingly high again, investors who take heed stand to reap the rewards.

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