Silver
Silver (chemical symbol: Ag) has roughly 200 exploring/developing/producing companies listed on the two Canadian exchanges with a registered resource estimate. Silver is also a precious metal just like gold, but much cheaper, and its main purpose is for manufacturing goods.One would say this would provide healthy supply/demand mechanisms, but this isn't exactly true as the price of silver is more or less connected to gold within certain ranges. The current price of silver is about $15/oz which means gold currently trades at a multiple of 75 at the moment. This price is a problem for most producers as production costs range between $15-20/oz. The long term median for the last 20 years or so is thought to be around 60:
There seems to be oversupply of silver at the moment as new mines are coming online, and the silver ETFs have record holdings as opposed to the gold ETFs which are at record lows lately, outflow reportedly bought by India and China through Swiss refineries and smelters who convert the large ETF gold bars into small, more convenient and better tradable bars.
