Pre-covid, I religiously saved silver (and gold). Just bought some every single paycheck for like 6 years. I had coins, jewelry, bars, silverware, etc.
I wished my parents had left me a treasure, but they didn't, so I thought I'd do that for my kids, maybe even leave them a map... But I don't have kids, so after being locked in my house during covid, I kind of went a bit crazy.
I sold it all and moved states (after travelling quite a bit). My collection was quite massive, and I 100% knew that this day would come, but I didn't care, I just needed a new view. I live near the beach now, but... if I just held, I'd be in a much better place. I hate myself a bit for selling.
At least you didn’t buy bitcoin at $200 and sell at $400 thinking you made out like a bandit, like me. (I basically never think about this though, and it shouldn’t hurt your soul.)
Heh I bought at $20 and sold at $1000. It was only 1 BTC. I bought I think 2 or 3 and mined a bit too but back then exchanges got hacked all the time. Honestly I do not feel bad. Every pizza I bought could have been tens of thousands too if I knew how BTC would turn out (or Nvidia or Netflix or the outcome of any major sporting event, etc.). I made a profit and it helped at the time. I am not sore about it because I also do not know how many dumb investments I passed up that would have just lost money.
My version of this took place in 2003 when I bought shares of a new company that rented out DVDs through the mail. I had been a customer for a few years and thought it was a pretty neat concept. Bought at around $20 per share, sold at around $27 a few years later when I was a broke grad student and needed some cash. What’s done is done. At some point, you just need to let it go.
Your upset because you used hard earned money to completely change your life to the point that you now live near the beach? Buddy, that is exactly what money is for and it appears you used it more wisely than 99% of everyone else. Congrats on making the leap to better your situation and have experiences that will never be replaced. Enjoy your life! Looks like you are doing that so continue doing it! This is what it is all for!
If you sold it and bought housing 4+ years ago when interest rates were near zero you've still got the last laugh.
People holding dollars instead of PMs or real estate are the real bag holders. Not only are they actively paying for those fed generated artificial interest rate negative real rate mortgages that property owners got (paid for via inflation on non property owners), they missed out on massive appreciation of property and PMs. They are literally paying the richest people to become even richer, and paying them for the privilege to get further and further away from ever owning their own home.
If you sold in 2023 or 2024 though, you basically got fucked both ways.
There's an asian AI guy on youtube providing a lot of information about what is going on with the silver right now. Sometimes it seems like he has some insider information, and the whole reasoning seems to come from an expert.
It's strange because it's just not one channel but multiple, and the person behind has kept uploading videos during the entire duration of these holidays. So far, he seems to be quite accurate with his predictions. It's been quite informative.
That video is an interesting switch-up from the past 'JP Morgan the silver suppressor' thing that everyone was going with. Now that silver is going up a new uniting belief is required for the silver stackers. Reminds me of the 'Game Stop stock will literally make everyone with a single share a millionaire' strat that had retail investors clamouring to get as much as much as they could and to hold it to the grave no matter how much it dropped. Just two more weeks bro. I think these sorts of videos prey on people without the sophistication to understand financial markets or assets. Everything the AI guy is saying could be 100% true but how would you know? Everything about Gamestop stock was a lie but it had the same sort of ring to it.
I guess eventually people develop enough discernment to say they don't know whats going on, until then slop like this is taken as Gospel.
OP did call him AI. If the underlying research is valid rather than AI generated it can still be valuable. Seems like this guy is using an AI persona essentially to communicate his ideas.
To me, AI Asian guy sounds like an AI generated person that is Asian. Asian AI guy sounds like you could be talking about Andrew Ng or some one else that teaches about ML, LLMs, etc.
Oh, I wrote "asian ai guy" because that's the name people are using in these YouTube videos.
Maybe you are right and the video is just ai slop. I just wanted to share it, because I learnt with them how futures, arbitrage and market manipulation works.
Also, I can assure you that I am not part of any campaign, but of course, what else would I say?
How is it infinite? Oil forms from ancient organic matter under intense heat and pressure, a process taking millions of years, making it non-renewable on human timescales.
Sarcasm? 150-200M oz of silver are recycled annually[1]. Oil obviously is mostly burned and won't be recoverable, and clearly finite (even if we managed to squeeze out more with fracking etc.)
Annually, we consume more oil than we find additional reserves of. The difference is something like 12 times less than annual consumption, and the gap is widening.
If you’ve found a way to escape that arithmetic, I’m all ears.
The math is pretty simple: the world consumes 36 billion barrels of oil a year and there are like 2 trillion barrels of known reserves. We have enough reserves for 55 years of current consumption. There’s 0 incentive to find more.
Ostensibly not all known oil fields are actively being extracted. This fact alone makes it unlikely that discovering a new source would affect the price of oil, unless it can be retrieved using cheaper than the existing methods. It’s also worth pointing out that “oil” as a resource isn’t this homogenous substance. Basically every different source of oil has a different (and expensive) refinement process on the other end. It’s a lot more variables than the Reddit-style armchair oil tycoon would probably expect.
I'm sorry, Reddit-style armchair oil tycoon? I've been using the word "oil" commodity the same way as everyone else has, why did you pick out my comment for that aspersion? Why not upthread when people were discussing 0 incentives? You are applying this aspersion and standard asymmetrically.
I'm surprised the WSJ didn't have any depth on what's happened and why.
"Backwardation" is a term that must be used here. That's where the spot price was higher than the future price.
For anyone unfamiliar, pretty much any commodity can trade under a futures contract. That means you as a producer or consumer can lock in a price at a future point. But you must come up with the commodity on that date or come up with the money and take delivery.
So imagine the spot (current) price is $70/oz but the future price is $65/oz. That means nobody is really buying at $70 when a price a month out is $65. So how does this happen/ Because dealers in the market have written futures contracts for silver they don't have and they will have to buy at the spot price to cover it at some point. They either don't want to or can't. Best case scenario, they're going to take a massive loss. Worst case, they are insolvent.
So there was little to no activity at the spot price even though it's at a record high. Refiners weren't buying.
There's a market for borrowing silver from people who have it and that market exploded this year as these dealers sought temporary relief for the futures contracts they had to cover.
All of this signaled that banks and refiners were essentially conspiring to suppress silver prices to remain solvent and that at some point the dam was going to burst.
And it did because China, who refines 60-70% of the world's silver, decided they would cease exports because of local demand for things like solar panels.
No major bank has an unhedged silver position remotely large enough to risk its solvency, the market is just not large enough. When I read this kind of conspiracy post I think you're long and talking your book.
Not sure which western countries you’re referring to but the US has pretty giant subsidies on oil.[0][1] Of course it’s also taxed but the pro source shows that most of the subsidies are tax reductions.
> However this doesn't reduce consumption, it just shifts the consumption to the developing world
This is true if production levels aren't responsive to prices, but I see no reason that would be the case. Petroleum production levels are known to be quite responsive to upward price movements.
I too wish we were weaving exotic matter metamaterials out of the aether, but until then hydrocarbons are a miracle from the heavens for their uses. A modern cedar tree.
The sun is but a poor, corrupted pun on starlight. The reflecting pool of crude shimmers with thin-film interference like nebulae on the celestial expanse.
You could argue that the sun was pretty useful, quite the “essential companion” in the Stone Age as well.
In fact, it is hard to imagine there would have been enough dead trees to make oil if it were not for the sun.
You could argue (pretty soundly) that oil is just a way of consuming the energy in trees which got that energy from the sun. So oil is just a way of extracting ancient solar energy.
Oil’s potential, left deep in the crust, remains latent. Every mote of sunlight, furiously brought to life by the maelstrom, seeks inexorably for immediate purpose.
They will when supplies eventually dwindle. We were saved from peak oil only by the invention/cheapening of fracking followed by the advent of horizontal drilling and unlocking of oil in shales. It's unlikely any such windfall will occur again, and even if it does that merely kicks the can down the road.
All petroleum was created from ancient forests before the evolution of microorganisms that could decompose fiber, so the plant material was simply buried and gradually became petroleum. Above ground, evolution produced organisms which could break down fiber. My point being, that not only is petroleum very useful, it is exceptionally rare on a geological timeline (at least on this planet ). It's like a cosmic trust fund, and like most trust fund recipents, we utterly squandered it. We took all this free energy, burned it to power ai slop, and poisoned ourselves in the process. We should have been using that oil to push humans out of the gravity well to Titan where petroleum is abundant. But no, we wanted big cars, cheap electricity and single use utensils.
Edit: I was mistaken, confusing coal and petroleum. While petroleum comes from microscopic ocean life, coal forms from the remains of terrestrial plants.
My point is that the chemical complexity (manufacturing uses) can be reproduced, and the energy storage density also can be. So really the gift of hydrocarbons under the ground is more that readily available energy is under our feet to help propel us towards higher levels sources of energy. IMO it’s a stepping stone and that’s effectively how humanity is using it.
I wouldn't even know where to sell (or buy) a barrel of oil. It's one of the most traded assets yet if someone handed me a barrel, I'd have no idea what to do with it.
Pre-covid, I religiously saved silver (and gold). Just bought some every single paycheck for like 6 years. I had coins, jewelry, bars, silverware, etc.
I wished my parents had left me a treasure, but they didn't, so I thought I'd do that for my kids, maybe even leave them a map... But I don't have kids, so after being locked in my house during covid, I kind of went a bit crazy.
I sold it all and moved states (after travelling quite a bit). My collection was quite massive, and I 100% knew that this day would come, but I didn't care, I just needed a new view. I live near the beach now, but... if I just held, I'd be in a much better place. I hate myself a bit for selling.
People holding dollars instead of PMs or real estate are the real bag holders. Not only are they actively paying for those fed generated artificial interest rate negative real rate mortgages that property owners got (paid for via inflation on non property owners), they missed out on massive appreciation of property and PMs. They are literally paying the richest people to become even richer, and paying them for the privilege to get further and further away from ever owning their own home.
If you sold in 2023 or 2024 though, you basically got fucked both ways.
It's strange because it's just not one channel but multiple, and the person behind has kept uploading videos during the entire duration of these holidays. So far, he seems to be quite accurate with his predictions. It's been quite informative.
If someone is curious, one of many: https://youtu.be/vBIUZGlNkks
https://x.com/echodatruth/status/2004802236224766009
I guess eventually people develop enough discernment to say they don't know whats going on, until then slop like this is taken as Gospel.
Then he went on to claim this bizzaro video has “been quite informative.” When it’s definitely an AI slop pumping mechanism.
TBH his comment is probably part of the campaign.
Maybe you are right and the video is just ai slop. I just wanted to share it, because I learnt with them how futures, arbitrage and market manipulation works.
Also, I can assure you that I am not part of any campaign, but of course, what else would I say?
Oil on the other hand is infinite.
1: https://www.physicalgold.com/insights/how-much-silver-is-rec...
What interest is served by posting this obviously wrong rhetoric?
If you’ve found a way to escape that arithmetic, I’m all ears.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=66564
"Backwardation" is a term that must be used here. That's where the spot price was higher than the future price.
For anyone unfamiliar, pretty much any commodity can trade under a futures contract. That means you as a producer or consumer can lock in a price at a future point. But you must come up with the commodity on that date or come up with the money and take delivery.
So imagine the spot (current) price is $70/oz but the future price is $65/oz. That means nobody is really buying at $70 when a price a month out is $65. So how does this happen/ Because dealers in the market have written futures contracts for silver they don't have and they will have to buy at the spot price to cover it at some point. They either don't want to or can't. Best case scenario, they're going to take a massive loss. Worst case, they are insolvent.
So there was little to no activity at the spot price even though it's at a record high. Refiners weren't buying.
There's a market for borrowing silver from people who have it and that market exploded this year as these dealers sought temporary relief for the futures contracts they had to cover.
All of this signaled that banks and refiners were essentially conspiring to suppress silver prices to remain solvent and that at some point the dam was going to burst.
And it did because China, who refines 60-70% of the world's silver, decided they would cease exports because of local demand for things like solar panels.
So here we are.
The higher the taxes the lower the price of crude has to be for people to afford it. This means reduced western demand at high prices.
However this doesn't reduce consumption, it just shifts the consumption to the developing world, where there are minimal if any taxes on consumption.
0: pro fossil fuels: https://energyanalytics.org/u-s-fossil-fuel-subsidies/
1: anti fossil fuels: https://e360.yale.edu/digest/republican-spending-bill-fossil...
This is true if production levels aren't responsive to prices, but I see no reason that would be the case. Petroleum production levels are known to be quite responsive to upward price movements.
In fact, it is hard to imagine there would have been enough dead trees to make oil if it were not for the sun.
You could argue (pretty soundly) that oil is just a way of consuming the energy in trees which got that energy from the sun. So oil is just a way of extracting ancient solar energy.
Edit: I was mistaken, confusing coal and petroleum. While petroleum comes from microscopic ocean life, coal forms from the remains of terrestrial plants.
edit: let me elaborate.
My point is that the chemical complexity (manufacturing uses) can be reproduced, and the energy storage density also can be. So really the gift of hydrocarbons under the ground is more that readily available energy is under our feet to help propel us towards higher levels sources of energy. IMO it’s a stepping stone and that’s effectively how humanity is using it.
Every voter who votes for lower gas prices is agreeing that it's better to live inside the cruel empire than to build a world without empire