Why Collectors May Start With Silver Even As the Price of Gold Climbs

Price rallies, like the recent surge in the gold market, can inspire FOMO, the fear of missing out.

This week, the price of gold topped $3,700 per ounce, roughly twice its level two years ago — and the precious metal is on track for a record year. The high unit price for gold bars and coins could have some collectors feeling priced out of the market. A one-ounce gold bar or coin, like the Golden Eagle, is now worth as much as a well-used car.

But there’s another precious metal that’s also been on the rise recently — one that’s a lot more affordable when it comes to the kind of physical forms available at Costco or a local dealer.

“Gains in gold attract ancillary buying in silver, possibly by investors who have not taken full advantage of the gold rally,” HSBC precious metals analyst James Steel wrote in a note last month.

In percentage terms, silver’s rally of 47% this year so far outpaces gold’s 39%, as of midday Friday. The two-year gains for both metals are remarkably similar.

“If gold keeps going up, silver, with a lag, will do the same,” said Ed Yardeni, a market veteran and president of consulting firm Yardeni Research.

He expects gold to reach $4,000 by the end of this year, as some other Wall Street investors have predicted.

Currently at around $43 per ounce, silver’s lower price per ounce has made it an entry point for some novice collectors who don’t have to spend nearly as much cash to begin learning the ups and downs of owning physical precious metals.

That’s what one collector previously told Business Insider he did when starting out, later shifting into gold when he got more comfortable buying metals and realized how much more storage space silver requires.

“I’m not going to be able to carry a suitcase full of silver around,” this collector said.

While silver has several similarities with gold, it also carries more risk, thanks largely to its heavy use in industrial applications that tie it more to the economy.

“Silver is more volatile, typically both up and down, so it’s a wilder ride,” Stefan Gleason, CEO of Money Metals Exchange, a large US precious metals dealer, told Business Insider. “It’s not something that you should be looking at in terms of a short-term investment because of that.”

While silver lacks gold’s advantage as a widely accepted reserve stock, it has seen several price rallies in recent years that correlate strongly with gold, though silver tends to be delayed a bit.

“Silver very much acts like a leveraged play on gold,” Gleason said. “It goes up more when gold goes up, particularly in the latter half of a bull market, and it goes down more when gold goes down.”

Gleason sees more upside to silver, given the historically wide price ratio between gold and silver right now. Investors scrutinize that, Steel wrote. Steel’s August forecast, however, did not anticipate silver prices staying above $40 per ounce for very long.

That could be because some collectors are using this run of relatively high gold and silver prices to cash out, Steel found. That’s increasing the supply on the market.

“We’re actually doing more buying of metal, back from back from our customers and from the public than we’ve ever done,” Gleason also said.

Still, as any avid collector knows and a novice will quickly learn, buying precious metals is a long play. Ownership often introduces new puzzles to solve, like where to store it, whether to insure it, and who to sell it to if the need arises.

Those are lessons that can be learned as easily with silver as with gold — at a fraction of the cost.