How to invest in silver, a precious metal that both diversifies your portfolio and rises with new tech industries

How to invest in silver, a precious metal that both diversifies your portfolio and rises with new tech industries

Savvy investors often step outside the comfort zone of conventional paper investments “” stocks, bonds, and funds “” and into more exotic, hard assets. Silver is one such. Like other alternative investments, it often performs in an opposite way to traditional securities: its price rising when theirs falls, and vice versa. So it can be an invaluable way to diversify a portfolio.

Silver is more than a stock market hedge, though. As a physical commodity, it has an intrinsic value, which means it's immune to inflation “” the rise in prices that erodes the value of paper, government-issued currencies. Given its inherent worth, some investors also see it as a safe haven against political and economic turmoil, similar to its more glamorous cousin, gold. 

But silver is much more affordable than its yellow-metal cousin. Also, unlike gold, silver is valued for its widespread industrial uses “” including innovative, high-growth tech industries like solar energy and electric autos. 

All these factors have precious metal experts like Giancarlo Camerana, a strategic advisor at QORE Switzerland feeling optimistic about the performance of silver in the coming decade. What it comes down to, he says, is "a combination of bullish factors: increased demand from both the industrial