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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;-jeffB, post: 1988164, member: 27832&quot;]Peace, everyone, please. There&#039;s a lot of valuable discussion happening in this thread, and I&#039;d hate to see it shut down for rules violations, either real or perceived.</p><p><br /></p><p>As I&#039;ve said before, I&#039;m a technical-analysis skeptic; I generally describe it as &quot;astrology&quot; or &quot;numerology&quot;. [USER=29643]@NorthKorea[/USER] has offered perhaps the strongest defense I&#039;ve seen so far, and it&#039;s given me a lot to think about. It&#039;s certainly a lot more convincing than the &quot;...and <i>that</i> cloud looks like a descending wedge!&quot; that I&#039;m used to seeing.</p><p><br /></p><p>More to the point, I think [USER=71723]@V. Kurt Bellman[/USER] and [USER=29643]@NorthKorea[/USER] agree on one point: technical analysis works (&quot;becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy&quot;) if most major market players are using it. It still seems to me that it&#039;s willfully ignoring the factors that <i>actually</i> drive prices, but it&#039;s not possible to have perfect knowledge of those factors. It&#039;s a bit like what drove behaviorism in psychology. I don&#039;t like behaviorism, either, but I acknowledge that it delivers (some) results. Heck, I don&#039;t even like statistics, but it seems to be the best substitute we have for omniscience.</p><p><br /></p><p>Kurt, several times you&#039;ve mentioned the collapse of the photographic silver market. The numbers really are enormous. Don&#039;t you think, though, that most of that damage is done now? Demand from that source was something like 270 million ounces at its 1999 peak, almost 25% of total demand; last year, it was down to about 50 million ounces, just a hair over 5% of the market. From here, whether its decline gets steeper or shallower, it&#039;s just not big enough to have a huge market effect.</p><p><br /></p><p>There&#039;s constant pressure to reduce silver consumption in other industrial processes, because the stuff&#039;s expensive. There&#039;s constant pressure to reduce <i>all</i> feedstock expenses in industrial processes. But as we find ways to reduce the amount of silver those processes need, we keep finding new processes that require it. From a chemical-engineering-spectator point of view, I don&#039;t see silver demand diminishing in the large; it&#039;s just too incredibly useful in too many widely varying ways.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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