Soaring silver miners: Fresnillo and Hochschild Mining
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There are a number of entrenched dynamics that make gold an attractive proposition these days - and where gold goes, silver tends to follow (but with added rocket fuel). In fact, some call silver the long shadow of gold. It’s a riskier and more leveraged play on the same dynamics of widespread currency debasement and non-existent bond yields. The correlation is slightly obscured by larger industrial demand for silver, but they are correlated nonetheless. Silver is more volatile because it is a smaller market with lower liquidity. Back in the 70s and 80s the Hunt Brothers cornered the entire private market, taking a huge leveraged position and causing the dramatic price spike in the chart below. They allegedly held one-third of the entire world supply of privately held silver. This remarkable situation prompted the jeweler Tiffany's to take out a full page ad in The New York Times, saying "We think it is unconscionable for anyone to hoard several billion, yes billion, dollars' worth of silver and thus drive the price up so high that others must pay artificially high prices for...