In my humble opinion I believe that the real Bubble has already Burst It is the U.S. Dollar and precious metals prices are bearing this out Edited to add Link to USD Index Chart http://www.fxstreet.com/rates-charts/usdollar-index/?version=1
In response to Cloud's comment about markets, the old saying comes to mind, "Markets can be irrational for much longer than you can remain liquid". When or if to sell physical silver is one thing, but trying to time a drop is another. Remember that many brilliant people went broke predicting the dot com crash, they were right but they were early and the market kept on rising. Just a friendly warning to anyone thinking of buying shorts, (or longs). When markets start being fed off of psychology and emotion instead of data, that is when I feel free to buy or sell with cash if I feel like it, but I stay the heck away from leveraged plays, and usually stay away from the market entirely. With human emotion involved, there never is any predictive value.
A couple of folks have stated in this thread that demand or industrial demand for silver has diminished over the past decade or so. Which industries have reduced their use of silver ? Is this based on national or global statistics ? Some articles I have read say that the demand for silver has and continues to increase in Asia and those increases are specifically due to their industrial and electronics needs. I will now interject my uneducated gut feeling on silver: Silver's value has obviously been manipulated for a long time (from my limited understanding , as far back as Carson City days). Silver has been 1 of multiple victims of global banking elite (and their puppets) , going back to pre-world war one. Silver will reach $61.00 per ounce before the end of May 2011. If silver dips before the end of 2011 it will not stay below $30.00 for more than a few days. (this time the manipulators will fail) People sell precious metals for various reasons and the only reason I would sell right now is to be able to purchase tangible goods that neither paper nor PM's will allow you to buy after the USA "officially" defaults on it's enormous global debt. So I would sell in chunks for the next 6 mos , but only with specific purchases already in mind.
http://www.silverinstitute.org/publications.php Check out the GFM's World Silver Survey 2010. There is a lot of data available on the Silver Institute website. I'm not sure how good it is, but it is as close to "official" as you will find.
One thing I that someone told me is that it is not worht the money to try and get the silver out of electronics.
Sadly, this is true for love, lust, friendship, etc., etc. also, and they are usually more of value than gold or silver.
Thank you for this resource. It took me a while to get around to seeing it , but it contains easy to understand information.
