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Silver Price

Like Gold , Silver has also doubled in value in the past years doubling the wealth of silver investors. The driving force behing silver price is the rising gap between supply and demand. Supply of silver has fallen short of the demand which has caused the metal to increase value. Rising oil prices , weakening dollar etc. are all contributing to increase of silver value.

Read more about Silver , Detailed History , Production etc >>



The price of silver is notoriously volatile, as it fluctuates between industrial and store of value demands. At times this can cause wide ranging valuations in the market, creating volatility.

Silver often tracks the gold price due to store of value demands, although the ratio can vary. The gold/silver ratio is often analysed by traders and investors. Over most of the 19th century the gold/silver ratio was fixed by law in Europe and the United States at 15.5, which meant one troy ounce of gold would buy 15.5 ounces of silver . The average gold/silver ratio over the 20th century was over 47.0

Year to 31st December	Silver price US$/oz	Gold price US$/oz	Gold/silver ratio
1910	0.54	20.67	38.28
1920	0.54	20.67	38.28
1930	0.33	20.67	62.67
1940	0.35	34.50	98.57
1950	0.80	40.25	50.31
1960	0.91	36.50	40.11
1970	1.64	37.60	22.93
1980	15.65	641.20	40.97
1990	4.17	423.80	101.63
2000	4.60	272.15	59.16
2005	8.83	513.00	58.10
2006	12.62	628.20	49.78

From 1973 the Hunt brothers began cornering the market in silver, helping to cause a spike in 1980 of $49.45 per ounce and a reduction of the gold/silver ratio to 17.0 (gold also peaked in 1980, at $850 per ounce) . However a combination of changed trading rules on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) and the intervention of the Federal Reserve put an end to the game. In 1997, Warren Buffett purchased 130 million ounces of silver at $4.40 per ounce (total value $572 million). Similar to gold, the silver price has more than doubled in value against the United States dollar since December 2001 . On May 6 2006 Buffett announced to shareholders that his company no longer held any silver. In April 2006 iShares launched a silver exchange-traded fund, called the iShares Silver Trust (NYSE: SLV), which as of January 2007 held 122,500 million ounces of silver as reserves.

War, invasion, looting, crisis

Silver prices rose, reversing August 29 2006 falls, as the metal found support from August 31 UN deadline for Iran to suspend uranium enrichment or face sanctions and as the dollar remained weak.

Why Silver is so precious

Silver is used in wide variety of applications. To mention a few..

• A major use of silver is as a precious metal. Sterling silver is 92.5 % silver, alloyed usually with copper. Jewelry and silverware are traditionally made from this. Silver is used in medals, denoting second place. Many high end musical instruments are made with silver, which benefit from a higher tone quality.

• The name of United Kingdom monetary unit 'Pound' originally had the value of one troy pound of sterling silver. Silver has been coined to produce money since 700 BC by the Lydians, in the form of electrum. Later, silver was refined and coined in its pure form. The words for "silver" and "money" are the same in at least 14 languages.

• The largest single end use of silver is photography, in the form of silver nitrate and silver halides are widely used in photography — 30 % of US production is used here.

• Some electrical and electronic products use silver for its superior conductivity, even when tarnished. For example, printed circuits are made using silver paints,and computer keyboards use silver electrical contacts. silver cadmium oxide is used in high voltage contacts because it can minimize arcing. Silver is also used to make solder and brazing alloys, electrical contacts, and high capacity silver-zinc and silver-cadmium batteries. Silver in a thin layer of on top of a bearing material can provide a significant increase in galling resistance and reduce wear under heavy load, particularly against steel.

• Mirrors which need superior reflectivity for visible light are made with silver as the reflecting material in a process called silvering, though common mirrors are backed with aluminium. Using a process called sputtering, silver (and sometimes gold) can be applied to glass at various thicknesses, allowing different amounts of light to penetrate. This is most often seen in architectural glass and tinted windows on vehicles.

• Silver's catalytic properties make it ideal for use as a catalyst in oxidation reactions; for example, the production of formaldehyde from methanol and air by means of silver screens or crystallites containing a minimum 99.95 weight-percent silver. Silver (upon some suitable support) is probably the only catalyst available today to convert ethylene to ethylene oxide (later hydrolyzed to ethylene glycol, used for making polyesters)—a very important industrial reaction.

• Oxygen dissolves in silver relatively easily compared to other gases present in air. Attempts have been made to construct silver membranes of only a few monolayers thickness. Such a membrane could be used to filter pure oxygen from air.

• Silver and silver products are widely used in medicines and medical equipments.

• Silver compunds are used in wide variety of applications such as Silver sulfide, also known as Silver Whiskers, is formed when silver electrical contacts are used in an atmosphere rich in hydrogen sulfide ; Silver fulminate is a powerful explosive ; Silver chloride can be made transparent and is used as a cement for glass ; Silver chloride is a widely used electrode for pH testing and potentiometric measurement ; Silver iodide has been used in attempts to seed clouds to produce rain ; Silver oxide is used as a positive electrode (cathode) in watch batteries to name a few.