Silver’s Future Not So Bleak After All?

In a recent article, Mineweb’s Lawrence Williams makes the case that the outlook for silver is not as bad as some market participants have suggested.

One point he makes is that industrial demand for silver is rising quickly, even as photographic demand declines. That’s important partially because recycled silver from the photographic sector used to be a “very significant source of silver supply” — the same cannot be said for the white metal’s new industrial uses.

Williams concludes:

There remains huge investor interest in silver and coupled with what we see as a likely growth in industrial usage, along with a possible drop in mine supply over the next couple of years, the prospects for it to perform better than gold remain strong. However it should be borne in mind too that silver is a very small market in the overall scheme of things and thus perhaps more subject to potential market manipulation than for any other major traded metal we know as it does not take a lot of money to move the market up or down. This will continue to make investment in silver probably more risky than in gold – it’s not known amongst traders as the Devil’s metal for nothing. But overall the portents do not look to this writer nearly as gloomy as some would have you believe.

Click here to read the full Mineweb report.