A few important notes:
Hfcomms' post above is generally correct, but he - like many, many other PM commentators - overlooks one critical aspect of PM values.
Precious metals generally track the rise and fall of currencies' values, but it's not a precise correlation. In $USD terms, Gold and Silver tend to track the currency's value, but they are more or less constantly over-shooting or under-shooting, as the case may be. This is the only reason that precious metals speculators can make any profit. Otherwise, buying and selling PMs would be no different than changing $10 bills into $1 bills.
Precious metals speculators, the good ones at any rate, are constantly measuring the spot value of the metals against other goods and services. When the ratios get too far out of whack, that's when they are able to book profits.
I'm neither a PM dealer or speculator, but do have a significant amount of my retirement in PMs. In my (ultra simple) case, when I notice that PM values are too low, I don't tend to sell any. When I see that they've risen to what I consider to be a fair or even high value, I will sell some. This is no different than what PM dealers and speculators do, though they operate on a far more sophisticated level.
I would never buy and sell PMs as a career, as I can think of few endeavors more likely to create grey hairs! On the other hand, they can be an exceptional vehicle to hold savings in a form most likely to avoid the ravages of inflation.
Best
Doc
I'm not sure, but you both may be missing this. Perhaps?
Around 1971 when Nixon took the USA off the gold standard there was not a single $Billion dollars in existence. It was still in the hundreds of millions. Then there WERE billions of US dollars. After a very very long time there were then $TRILLIONS of dollars. NOW, TODAY, there a quadrillions of US dollars. And all those digi dollars other countries have created out of thin air and speculation and greed.
That is why at some point bitcoin could and probably will get to a $million. This last weekend I head Bo Polny (not a big fan, don't follow him, but I do tune in now and then) say an ounce of Gold should be the same value as a bitcoin it finally hit me. Yeah, why NOT? I mean bitcoin used to be worth a few hundredths of a penny. Now look at it.
Once the panic hits, and most if not all debt based assets are crashing, when banks are failing, when confidence is REALLY lost even with the billionaire and trillionaire class, and they can't buy anymore sitoshi's because no one is selling, and the global entities that are holding physical gold and silver are NOT selling, waiting for whatever reset is coming,
what is so silly in thinking out of the box that gold could go to $80-$100K like the late Jim Sinclair said it would? And silver at $6K eventually?
My point is you are both thinking that gold and silver have a valuation in the real world at the Comex price - which is corrupt and manipulated, oh maybe just a little bit higher than Comex ............
I'm thinking of when the Comex is no longer followed; nobody is paying to the price Wall Street is setting for the suckers, or maybe Comex simply isn't there any longer.
I'm sure there are some on this forum, maybe one or both of you, that have as much or more silver, just silver alone not counting gold, the money of counts and kings, you have as much silver that would have made you as rich as a Saxon or Viking warlord in Anglo Saxon England around the hundreds of years of the seafarer's invasions. (not prying, just musing).
Maybe I will be proven totally off base, at least while I live. But my Spidy senses say people like Rafi are correct. For some, when the final crash occurs, they will be picking up houses for a pound or four of silver, or buying Teslas for a short stack (if they want one in a world of limited electricity
).
That is how it worked in history. And you don't have to go back to Anglo Saxon days. Weimar Germany, and NYC in the early decades of the 1900's. And there were not trillions of digi dollars in the world back then let alone quadrillions that will try to go SOMEWHERE when this Great Reset and Great Taking fails in a world wide morass of chaos.