LM portfolio as at 23/09/2022:
| Code | Sector | Date Bought | Cost | Value | Gain/Loss |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LM045 | Gas, Water & Multiutilities | 06/12/2021 | £1280 | £1130 | (11.30%) |
"Silver is going to be worth as much as gold" - so said one conspiracy nutcase on a live Youtube discussion with 3 of his fellow "truthers" yesterday evening. Obviously, they all agreed with him and added some further points to the discussion:
"well, they've just found all that gold under the Vatican and in the deep underground military bases"
"mud floods destroyed everything 200 years ago"
"satellites don't exist"
"there has been this technology of cloning people for thousands of years"
"there were pyramids built on Mars" and so on.
It's pretty hilarious until you realise these people are deadly serious.
Let's talk about the first claim - silver to be priced the same as gold.
Price check today: Silver is around $19 and gold is at $1640 or so.
So silver needs to double several times, or gold needs to crash massively. Don't see it happening myself but that's the good thing about daft claims like this, the person never specifies a time span. So technically he's not wrong yet.
Several years ago (around 2011/2012) there was a bit of a rush to buy silver coins because, all of a sudden, many people decided it was vastly undervalued. Back then the claims tended to be along the lines that "silver should be worth a tenth of gold". With gold at the time being around $1700, their reasoning was silver should be $170.
The price did rise - 1oz silver coins were selling for a premium on eBay, higher than the $30 price on the spot market and at one point silver almost reached $50.
These new silver bulls spread far and wide. I remember reading an interview in October 2011 where a professional wrestler (Kevin Nash) advised that everyone should invest in silver and make a fortune.
"Buy three ounces of silver a week. Not many guys can afford an ounce of gold at $1,680. But they can afford $31.80 for an ounce of silver"
No sooner had silver got to $50 that it dropped back to $45 then $40. 4 years later it was at $15.
The wrestler's advice came a few months after the peak at $50 but the decline in price didn't deter Kevin, he was obviously hopeful for the future of silver.
As we sit here in 2022, 11 years on, we know that anyone who listened to him would be down around 40%. I hope he didn't lose too much money.
Our conspiracy friend on the Youtube discussion offered no explanation on why silver will eventually become as valuable as gold, nor did his pal explain how he knows there were pyramids built on Mars or indeed who went there to build them.
In any case it isn't important. "That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence."
We can't tell what's definitely going to happen in the future, all we can do is use the charts to try and make a reasonable guess at whether the market is going to go up, down or trade sideways.
I wouldn't have been buying silver coins in October 2011 as the market had dropped 33% from a recent peak. And I'd probably not buy silver coins full stop as for some reason they attract VAT. Gold coins do not.
But there will be some people out there buying silver purely because of rumours like the one at the beginning of this update. Someone, somewhere will believe it and invest.