What Is Even More Enticing than Gold? Silver.

The dollar is out. The U.S. dollar index has fallen 5% last week.

Treasury bonds are quickly falling out of favor. The yield on 10-year Treasury bonds has climbed from 2.5% to almost 3.5% since March signaling inflation fears and an unwillingness to fund ballooning government borrowing.

Is this a sign of things to come?

Well, if you take a look at the mainstream headlines, you’d think so.

An editorial headline on Bloomberg proclaims, “Dollar is dirt, Treasuries are toast, and AAA is gone.”

Even CBS News is warning, “Inflation could be coming to a U.S. dollar near you.”

To me, it seems just like a typical overreaction in the short-term.

Yes, the long-run trend for the dollar is down as the Fed keeps printing more and more of them and monetizing government debt. And yes, the prospects for gold get brighter and brighter with each passing week.

But there’s no reason to lose your head here. It’s going to take a few years for all this to play out. And the window of opportunity is still wide open to buy precious metals, real assets, and assets not denominated in the dollar (like ADRs).

That’s why, despite the strong interest in gold at the moment, I encourage you to continue to look for value in the sector. Right now, there seems to be some exceptional value in an asset which is so undervalued, it could outpace gold by 400% or more.

I’m talking about Silver.

When Gold Climbs, Silver Soars

In the past few weeks gold has been getting a lot of attention. With all the big money finally taking a liking to gold, the attention is justified. Remember, a turn in the big money’s attitude towards gold must happen before gold can break through the $1,000 mark and stay there.

The excitement surrounding gold’s surge has only pushed silver further onto the back burner. (You don’t hear about any major hedge funds loading up on silver do you?) And that’s the point. Gold is hot and silver is – in a relative sense - not.

So if you want to find an investment which isn’t so hot but still has a lot of potential in an inflationary environment, you’d want to look at silver. When you do, it won’t take long to realize silver – at current levels – could easily trounce gold in the months and years ahead.

That’s right. Silver has a much brighter future than gold. All you have to do is look at the silver / gold ratio to see how potentially lucrative the situation has become.

Ratios Don’t Lie

We’ve looked at a few ratios in the past. The reason is because ratio analysis can help identify value even in volatile markets. For instance, we looked at how the gold / oil ratio was signaling oil was a buy back in January. Oil prices are up almost 50% since then.

We looked at gold / gold stocks ratio back in December. We saw that gold stocks were significantly undervalued relative to gold. Since early December, gold is up a respectable 22% while gold stocks – as a group - have rebounded 70%.

That’s the value of ratio analysis. They can quickly show you how undervalued some assets are relative to other others. And if you’re able to find them at extreme points, you can get into a trade or investment with less risk and greater upside.

Right now, the gold / silver ratio (the measure of how many ounces of silver can be bought for an ounce of gold) is at an extreme and working its way back to historical norms.

by Andrew Mickey

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