Is silver a foolish buy right now?

My two cents:

1. Be sure to buy on the dips. Always. Margins are too tight to be buying on arbitrary days and prices. You can define your own dips by tracking a moving average and setting a threshold below that moving average. For example, you could track the 200 day MA, and buy when the spot price is at least 1% below that average. Or 2% or 5% or whatever. You can play with it to figure out what threshold makes the most sense for you. The 200 day MA is a standard period in the metals trading industry, which is why I mention it – you can find the data easily by searching on DuckDuckGo or whatever. Or you can go by shorter-term MAs, like 30 or 90 days. If you want to commit to buying silver every month, like dollar cost averaging, you can come up with a trigger threshold that is likely to happen most months (there's no guarantee that you'll see a particular threshold happen – you'll have to play with it).
2. If you buy physical bullion, find the lowest prices. This seems obvious, but lots of people overpay for various reasons. The lowest prices are from online dealers. Last I saw, the lowest prices in the US were at SD Bullion, Silver.com, Bullion Exchanges, and recently JM Bullion when they changed their pricing strategy. You'll have to check these and other dealers to make sure when you buy because the lowest priced dealers aren't fixed – they sometimes change. JM Bullion owns Silver.com, and they set it up so that Silver.com was the aggressively low priced dealer and JM Bullion was the moderate priced dealer with the larger selection. But then a few months ago I saw JM Bullion undercut everyone else, so they must have changed their strategy. I have no idea if that's still the case. Also, never use a credit card to buy – the card prices are about 4% higher at all dealers because of the fees (debit card interchange fees for cards issued by major banks are extremely low at 0.05% plus 21 cents, so dealers should offer check prices for those, but they don't – their payment processors might not offer the option to do so).
3. The best premiums are through pooled accounts, allocated, unallocated, silver ETFs, etc. Buying retail physical silver has the highest premiums. Those premiums shot up near the start of the pandemic, have dropped some since, but are still higher than before the pandemic. No idea when or if premiums will return to pre-pandemic levels. I have a good snapshot of premiums just before the pandemic, in early 2020, in this Google spreadsheet. Outfits like OneGold are pretty good for buying silver without taking physical possession of it – I forget whether it's allocated or not. It's a joint business of APMEX and I think Sprott. (Don't buy physical bullion from APMEX though – they're one of the most expensive dealers in the US, but that doesn't apply to the OneGold outfit.)

By the way, Texas Precious Metals is the one dealer I know of that offers automatic threshold buying, like what I mentioned in point #1 above. This is called "limits" in the investing world, and is common with stock brokers. TPM has a good reputation in the industry – another dealer told me they were "good people". They're kind of niche in having a limited selection of inventory compared to the big players like SD Bullion, JM Bullion, etc. I'm not sure what the details are with their automated buying, like what sorts of variables and conditions you can specify, but they're the only dealer I know of that offers this. If I was a dealer, I'd offer a very rich tool for automated purchases.

 

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Silver sets at half it’s all time high while gold has just set an ath and you don’t see any any chance of making a profit from silver?

Do you think we see 4k$ dollar gold before we see 50$ silver?

Good loard

Silver has been mined as a by product of gold mining for quite a while. It isn’t profitable on its own because there aren’t many Comstock loads laying around these days.

 

The bottom line is there is just to much
Silver and they actually have closed
mines, if you look at the scope of things
and do the math, since both are mined
in similar fashion your basically doing
the same amount of work GOLD =
$ 2,000 an once or SILVER = $ 25
an once, a good example there.

 

I think silver is a great buy right now. It had better be at the current spot prices.

 

A great buy at $26 an once ? from a bullion stand point, right now a tough pill to
swallow, if its from a collector point of you, I say buy what you like

 

Yes, I buy what I like but not if the premium is crazy high like on silver! The days of going to your LCS and picking up an ASE for $2 or $3 over spot are long gone! I'll buy gold with the high premium but only if it's for my collection and I don't care about resale value!

 

But sometimes you dont have a choice, I bought a coupe of MS-70 Libertad
only because I couldn't find any B/U examples, which I think dollar for dollar
are a better value

 

I search junk silver prices daily and dabble in some and continue to look and you will find silver at a decent price to me anyways. Barber halves 9.40 to 9.50 around spot bought at 10.50 to 11.00 not bad when some places got them for 15.00 a piece or so Its the same on other U.S. coinage too FIND A NEEDLE IN HAYSTACK THING can be done though and condition of coin plays big. I think I read on here where Barber was a lazy engraver for the mint at that time. blind note grandchildren got easter barbers Sunday and chocolate wabbits

 

I'm still focusing on buying non-US junk silver as the premiums are very small or zero as compared to the excessive ones I've seen for US junk silver/bullion.

 

I agree Mr. Flute !!

 

I've been doing great just hitting the auctions, doing the math, and managing a couple hundred dollars a month worth of junk silver hitting my pocket at spot. That said, you can really see the ebb and flow of demand at where people are bidding at. I'm seeing early bids for a couple bucks over spot for essentially bullion grade Franklins, before even figuring the BP in. Crazy. But, you hit some where the price increments are your friend and if you're 1st on some of these, you almost have a lock. I don't even bother with bidding on the Morgans/Peace dollars they are so skewed right now.

 

Correct
jb10000lakes
It is really crazy on Morgans low grades around 30 and then its up and up and away on the prices but they are getting bids at that price 40 to 50 and up. I come across a lot of 1890 cc.. it seems.

 

I would think Carson cities would demand a premium? sticking with other mints
might do you solid as there allot more common.

 

Bought today but probably doesn’t count as I got this Montreal Olympics set for only $40 from one of my LCSs:



This is currently ~$99 in silver value. I plan to go back tomorrow and buy the other 10 sets at this price.

“Make your profit at purchase” for sure.

 

I dont think you LCS will be in business very long making sales like that, isn't the idea of any business owner is to make money not lose it...LOL

 

Well, apparently they bought them for ~$36 per set, so....

 

Back when silver was considerably higher than it is now I bought a number of Canadian sterling $5 and $10 proofs. I got the impression that it's hard to get full silver value for them. At $40 a set, though, I'd clean the guy out, too.

 

Then I plan to drive over to another of my LCSs and sell them for silver-20% and still make ~100% profit.

...so I got that going for me which is nice.

 

It happens. Around the same time, when silver was spiking, I bought a bag of quarters at a show for 25.5x face. I picked through them, saved out a couple, and sold the rest one aisle over for 26x.

 

That local coin shops business plan
leaves allot to be desired…LOL