With one foot in the precious metals camp and the other squarely planted in the industrial metals complex, silver has an ambivalent nature that exposes the market to a variety of economic and geopolitical forces. Volatility is often the watchword with silver as prices can and often do trade in wide daily ranges; but with volatility comes profit opportunity as well as risk. The Matrix Account from Precious Metal One offers silver investors an open-ended, limited-risk trading vehicle that can provide up to 5:1 leverage to help maximize profits.

Precious Metal One offers silver in 1,000-ounce bullion bars and routinely maintains a two-way market throughout a 10 -hour trading day, 8:00am – 6:00pm (EST), Monday thru Friday.

52-week high: $21.44 on March 17, 2008
52-week low: $8.40 on October 28, 2008

SILVER FACTS:

• Silver has been prized for its beauty and durability for at least 6000 years; silver jewelry was found in the sarcophagus of King Tutankhamen.
• Silver is the best conductor of heat and electricity of all elements. It also has the highest degree of optical reflectivity of all elements. A silver mirror can reflect about 95% of the visible light spectrum. (Most mirrors are silver)
• Silver is more malleable than any element except gold. (Malleability is the ability of a substance to be hammered into thin sheets.) Silver is more ductile than any element except gold. (Ductility is important in drawing a metal into thin wire.)
• A rich deposit of silver may yield several thousand ounces of silver per ton of ore. The most common silver mineral is argentite. Pure argentite is about 85% silver. Silver sometimes occurs in nature in virtually pure form, as few other metals do. (Gold and copper among them.) More than 2/3 of the silver produced worldwide is a byproduct of lead mining and copper mining.
• The major producers of silver include the United States, Mexico, Canada, Peru, Russia and Australia.
• Sterling silver is an alloy of 92.5% silver and 7.5% other metal(s), usually copper and has almost twice the tensile strength of pure silver. (Tensile strength is the ability of a substance to resist breaking when stretched.) Sterling silver has more than twice the hardness of pure silver. (Hardness is the resistance of a substance to scratching.)
• The early United States silver dollars contained 371.25 grains of pure silver. (A troy ounce contains 480 grains) The gold dollar contained 24.75 grains of pure gold. The ratio between the two was 15 to 1. In 1834, the amount of pure gold in the United States gold dollar was decreased to 23.2 grains, which effectively made the ratio 16 to 1. The ratio most closely observed these days is the gold/silver price ratio, which stands at about 52 to 1.
• In 1965, the silver content of the United States half-dollar was reduced to 40%. By 1970, the United States half-dollar contained no silver.
• The market price of silver hit an all-time high of $50.35 per ounce in January 1980.